#student reflections

Student Reflections: Career Goals, Mentorship, and Life Skills At ElimuHub Education Consultants, we believe that every learner’s journey is shaped by their dreams, their mentors, and the life skills they build along the way. This post captures a student’s personal reflection — ideal for classroom writing prompts, mentorship programs, or youth empowerment workshops. 🚀 Future Careers: My Dream…

Student Reflections: Career Goals, Mentorship, and Life Skills At ElimuHub Education Consultants, we believe that every learner’s journey is shaped by their dreams, their mentors, and the life skills they build along the way. This post captures a student’s personal reflection — ideal for classroom writing prompts, mentorship programs, or youth empowerment workshops. 🚀 Future Careers: My Dream…

Student Reflections: Career Goals, Mentorship, and Life Skills At ElimuHub Education Consultants, we believe that every learner’s journey is shaped by their dreams, their mentors, and the life skills they build along the way. This post captures a student’s personal reflection — ideal for classroom writing prompts, mentorship programs, or youth empowerment workshops. 🚀 Future Careers: My Dream…

Student Reflections for the 19-20 school year

School officially ended on Monday. It didn’t feel like a typical end of the school year as teachers said goodbye via Zoom and then shut off their computers for a little while. It’s now time to reflect, drink my coffee slowly, work on a few house projects and take some time for self care.

Before leaving for the summer I asked students to fill out a Desmos surveythat I found online. It was…

My fifth graders finished up a math unit around a week ago.  The unit took around 1-2 months and students explored topics pertaining to decimals, percentages and box plots. Near the end of November I had a discussion with Jack about student reflections and previewing units.  Jack shared a Tweet by Chrissy about cool-down bins.

https://twitter.com/LyonsMath/status/1198296424309346304

I thought…

  This year I’ve been using number sense routines* with my 3rd-5th grade classes.  The routines have specifically been put into place to help students strengthen their place value and estimation skills.  The routines last around 5-10 minutes and generally occur during the first part of class  The routines is the first thing on the board as students enter.  Students use a template, complete the routine independently and we discuss the results and process as a class.

Two of the more productive routines this year have been Estimation180 (3rd grade) and Who am I (4th).  Both ask students to use hints or models and then use those visualizations to solve problems.  Students document their thinking on an individual page and then we discuss it as a class through a debrief session.  While working with students this year I noticed that not all students participated to the extend that I’d like.  The conversations were decent and students were engaged, but the reflection piece wasn’t as thorough.  So this year I’ve decided to add an individual reflection component for these specific tasks.  The reasoning actually came from a book that I read back in April that emphasized how sentence stems can be used to help students reflect on their mathematical thinking.

I put these sentence stems into practice and added them to a reflection sheet.  I added extra space after the “because” to help encourage students to write more about their own thinking process.

Students complete each one of these around 2-3 times a month.  Students complete the reflection sheet, discuss the writing with partners and eventually put them in their folders.  The sheets are revisited throughout the year to see the growth over time.

* The images from this post are from a math routines presentation on 5/3. Feel free to check out the entire presentation here.

Today I’m reminiscing upon my time spent in an Elementary School Math Class, and the teaching of angles. I wonder what would happen in this classroom if the students first watched the teacher model drawing acute, obtuse and right angles. Then the students draw their own angles on paper followed by working in a group where a Sphero Mini is remotely controlled  to move along the rays around the…