PHASE 3
Phase 3: Action Plan
Desired results
I want to integrate science into the math curriculum by using global issues that affect all of
us such as food shortages, malnutrition, and food wastage, so the students feel more
connected to their surroundings and motivated to work cooperatively on a topic that affects
everybody.
Key ideas:
♦ Global food shortage (Develop understanding of statistical variability)
Students will understand the impact of food shortage by discussing what they experience
and see in their own communities. They will interpret graphs with statistics of children
their age that suffer from serious malnutrition and the number of people who starve to
death daily.
♦ Lack of nutritional diets versus access to nutritional diet (Understand ratio concepts
and use ratio reasoning to solve problems).
Students will understand that learning how to read food nutrition labels will help them to
make healthier choices. Students will keep a track of the foods they consume daily for a
week .Students will apply this knowledge to figure out what percentage of each nutrient is
recommended daily. Students will make their own individual meal plan with the
percentage of beneficial nutrients for each student.
♦ Buying local products (Understand the place value system to solve problems involving
decimals).
Students will understand how or where any of the food they eat was grown. Why is this
important? They will go to a grocery store and buy products necessary to prepare a healthy
lunch. The will be able to make a decision of what to buy, how to get the best deal, how to
buy enough food to cook for eight students, know the total expenses, and what change to
expect so they know the money they have will be enough.
♦ Making healthy decisions: Snack guidelines (Use understanding of multiplication
And division to solve problems using fractions).
Students will use their knowledge to prepare in class simple and nutritious snacks for their
classmates.
♦ Food Wastage
Students will understand the significance of their actions when they have leftover food
scraps and throw them into the garbage after they see how the food is wasted in our school.
They will plan nutritional meals for their family based on the number of servings they
need.
♦ Food processing distribution (Understand ratio concepts and use ratio reasoning to solve
problems involving speed and distance).
Students will understand how companies manage the distribution of food to the costumers.
They will learn about the distances between different points of distribution and time
consumed during trips
♦ Awareness of lacking foods
The Do It! Keep It Simple! event is an idea taken from the Caritas Australia program
where the students, in conjunction with the school community, will raise money and
awareness of what it’s like to have only limited access to most the basic foods. This
project will encourage our community to take some action about poverty and create a more
compassionate students as well as a community.
These ideas are a key to the desired goal because they will allow my students to enhance
their learning by making connections to what they experience at home, in the community
and in the school with what they will learn. By exposing them to global ideas that are
related to themselves, and by leading them to meaningful discussions about specific goals
such as students understanding the state of mind incited by deprivation of food, students
will have the opportunity to develop different understandings.
Performances of understanding
Since “understanding is the purpose of instruction” (Tina Blythe and Associates, 1998),
one of my goals will be to use more ongoing assessments that demonstrate the growth of
my student’s understanding of a concept throughout the entire process. I will incorporate
different types of assessments such as students’ surveys to learn about the type of
intelligence inclination my students have and how to tie their strengths into the activities
they can choose to demonstrate understanding; setting work stations as entry points
(Howard Gardner) to allow exploration of a given topic by incorporating different avenues
(based on what I learned from the survey) that appeal to their multiple intelligences. Since
my group of diverse learners is small, I would like to incorporate more one-to one
feedback at least every other day to help them dispel any misconceptions and to stimulate
them to improve with each step. This is important because I will be able to adjust my
instruction, activities, and goals based on what I learned from the feedback. I will use a
checklist for classroom observations during the period of exploration. Another assessment
that I want to utilize more will be posting one or two Open-ended questions to stimulate
student’s reflection and rethinking, by explaining and confronting their ideas within their
cooperative group and within their class. For Formal assessment, I will use Problem-Based
Learning with a rubric where students have to solve a real problem and apply what they
know to solve it. Through the days during the week or weeks that the learning is taking
place, the students will have the opportunity to work individually and use a self-
evaluation; other times, they will work with a partner and use a peer evaluation as part of
their grade. To encourage students to apply and demonstrate what they know, I will use
performance based assessments where students have to develop surveys to understand data
and interpret graphs; conduct projects were they have to write a healthy menu based on the
percentage of calories and nutrients they need to consume; creating a weekly budget for
their family based on what they know about unit rates ; planning a nutritional menu for a
week for their families by applying what they know about servings, percentages, and
fractions; creating problems to identify places of food distribution close to their houses and
the time consumed during distribution . Lastly, I will use “tiered activities” where the
concepts and skills are the same for all my students but the complexity, abstractness and
open-endedness varies based on each student’s needs.
CONTEXT
My students are 6th and 7Th grade diverse learners who have various learning disabilities.
Among them are: visual perceptual deficits, difficulty remembering math facts, left-to-
right sequencing, and trouble reading. I see the 6th and 7th graders for 50 minutes each day
separately. I foresee a time constraint in this context because I don’t see my students often
except for the 50 minute period. However, since I have flexibility to use a curriculum that
best fits my students’ needs, I am able to use the time accordingly to what I need. On
Mondays and Tuesdays, I will plan on working on background knowledge and mini-
lessons; Wednesdays and Thursdays, the class will work in groups according to challenge
levels and interests, and on Fridays there will be a whole class review, reinforcements, and
uncovering misunderstandings.
My students don’t have much interest in math and most of the time they refer to it as a
hard subject and boring. They get easily frustrated and shut down when they see a problem
to solve. 98% of them don’t know their times tables; they cannot multiply and divide; they
are still counting and adding and subtracting using their fingers. The infrastructure in my
classroom is supported by a projector and a document camera. We have five chrome-books
I-pads. Students are not allowed to use their phones. My space is limited. My classroom is
a library converted into a small room and it is located in the basement. During math class,
students from the low grade levels are eating outside my classroom and the level of the
noise gets raised at times.
CONTENT
I want to integrate science into the math curriculum using global issues that affect us such
as food shortage, malnutrition, and food wastage, so the students feel more connected and
motivated to work cooperatively on a topic that affects everybody. While we go through
these issues, I want to add credibility to these ideas by using math (rates, percentages,
decimals, fractions.). For my students, I want to see them engaged throughout the topic
and being able to explain what they are doing and why. For me as a teacher, I want to be
able to use more activities that promote explanation, interpretation, application, and self-
assessment among my students. The problems my students might have will be accessing
appropriate material that is at their instructional reading level; navigating websites;
manipulating computer devices; reading information; understanding academic vocabulary;
taking notes/writing. One of the challenges will be finding appropriate tasks/activities that
are equally interesting, appealing and focused on essential understandings and skills for
the different types of learning styles and needs of my students. Challenging concepts are
understanding the concept of ratio and using it to convert measurement units and to solve
real-world problems by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double
number line diagrams, and equations. Another concept will be interpreting quotients of
fractions, and solving real world problems involving division by using equations to
represent the problem.
Pedagogy
In order to engage my students more in their own learning, I definitely increment the use
of metaphors as a mnemonic device that will help my students internalize their learning in
a fun way. Some of the approaches I will be using are:
♦ Lectures: as a way to promote understanding, uncover misconceptions and discuss
concerns and difficulties.
♦ Discussions will be a priority for me. My idea is to gradually change from instrumental
to relational math and have my students learning through collaboration in groups. I will
encourage them to spend time within a group to develop understanding by discussion,
evaluating ideas, identifying problems and solutions by sharing points of view.
♦ Case problem where students have the opportunity to use different ways to solve
problems; practice problem solving; practice high-level cognitive skills; develop
collaborative skills and relate gained knowledge to real world.
♦ Visual aids and graphic organizers /manipulatives
♦ Using story-telling by introducing or posting a question/big idea as a story
♦ Provide opportunities for my students that foster pleasing experiences with the world and
help them generate ideas to explain the nature of what they see.
Technology
Since I am a novice in technology, I will begin to integrate some technologies, and as I
gain more confidence, I will add more to facilitate and transform my instruction, and
learning in my students. I will rely on the Chromebooks and I-pads as the main source of
devices.
I believe in the power of videos to engage students in their own learning. I intend to use
short videos from teachertube and other websites, and later some videos made by me and
some made by the students using animoto to demonstrate their understanding of the topic.
♦ Goggle slides: to present ideas from and to students
♦ I-images
♦ Crazytalk7 facial animation which is extremely visual for my students, and is a way to
stimulate their creativity, let them record their own voices, and type their thoughts.
♦ Maker Ed: Game changers such as google cardboard, paper circuits, and Strawbees; as
well as math games such as Unifix cubes and fraction pies.
♦ Series of Common Core Mathematics books, that include a variety of concepts such as
patterns and making generalizations; exploring literacy in technical subjects; and reasoning
and modeling with number and operations. Among these titles will be Patterns in Nature,
The Bake Sale, What are the Budgets? It Started with Pizza, What Did I Eat?, and Package
Design.
♦ I am really excited to include the Songify app in my classroom as a way to assess my
students.
This plan hit the “sweet spot” because it will take my students on a journey of discovery
through engaging events that will stimulate their creativity with fun and technological
activities, induce their understanding through problem based learning, encourage them to
take risks in a cooperative learning environment, use their strengths based on their learning
styles, and expand their social skills to be able to respond to a global environment.