First Challenge

Tasks. The first challenge.

As I began planning my year in math, I encountered my first obstacle. First, and foremost, I found that I could not plan my year, as in pervious years. I could not say, on November 3^rd, I will have unit three complete. I do not know this as it would depend on my students and where they were at that particular time. Perhaps, the biggest challenge in this was the way the Grade Six program is organized. As in every math course, there are units of work that focuses on some idea, or similar content. Grade 6 math was no different, where there were 12 different units of work. I thought this was a bit much and after teaching it last year, I found some of the specific outcomes that were in specific units seemed to just not fit. I then decided that the way in which the content was organized did not match or fit the approach I wanted to take. I wanted to teach and focus on the big ideas, the ideas the unified and connected everything else. I started to review the outcomes I was responsible for teaching and began noticing patterns. Imagine, patterns in math. I began noticing that there were several underlying themes within the whole curriculum, namely whole numbers, length, perimeter and area, quadrilaterals, decimals, fractions, percentages and ratio, data management and so on and each of the outcomes, aside from a few, could fit within these themes. I decided this is how I was going to begin. I grouped the outcomes together based on these aforementioned groupings and as a result formed my own ‘units’.

Although I was pleased with this outcome, it did not really reflect where I wanted to go. I had envisioned students working on problems and investigations that did not go in any such order. I had intended on finding problems that students would complete, and by June would have achieved all of the desired outcomes, but not in any particular fashion. I did not like the static structure of units, I did not like how for two or three weeks students would be working on multiplying, or fractions and then switch to measurement. But for now, as I get my head around this approach, this is how it would have to be.