This week was the last week of my student teaching for math. My students took to the multiples of 2, 5, and 9 really well as well as some properties after explicit instruction however, they were not doing so well with distributive property.
Immediately after going over problems students were sighing and saying "This is so easy, I got this." So I decided instead of doing the rest of the examples with them, I would allow them to do them on their own in their notebook and I would walk around and monitor them.
Now while most students got the steps of the property they had a few misconceptions on what exactly they were suppose to do for two of the steps. The first common problem I saw was students were breaking down the factor into two numbers which is correct however, instead of having those two numbers add up to the larger number they thought it had to multiply. Example 7 was broken down into 7 and 1 instead of 6 and 1.
The second problem I noticed was that students were not using the other factor that they didn't break down as their first factor in both parenthesis. They would take the second factor that they broke down and put it as the first factor in the second parenthesis. Example 6 x 7 break apart 7 into 6 and 1 then they would set up the problem as, (6 x 6) + (7 x 1) so they were using the 7 rather than the 6 in both cases.
Once I saw these misconceptions I was able to get the whole class together for a class discussion and make sure to explicitly model and think aloud each process and explain further why I was doing every step. This really helped the students and it definitely showed on their final assessment.
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