How glue makes things fall apart...

I always forget what glue does to my students.

I'm using a series by Scholastic to teach my students a unit on fractions. It's called Do the Math by Marilyn Burns. I'm a big fan of Scholastic products. I'm also a big fan of the people at Scholastic. Never before have I encountered a company so willing to listen to input from teachers and to change/adapt their products for use in the classroom based on that input. I digress, though. Back to the glue.

We are studying fractions. My students are learning what they are. I am learning how to teach about them. I've tried, rather unsuccessfully, for the last two years to cover this topic with my students. Then, someone recommended that I check out this series, and I fell in love with it. It is basically idiot-proof. And when I say "idiot-proof", I'm talking about idiot-proof for the teacher. Unless you try to do something different from what is in the book, you will have success teaching with this series. If you go outside of what the book details, you will confuse your students and yourself. Just follow the program. At least that is what I thought until yesterday.

We've been studying fractions for a few weeks. The kids have these great manipulatives that they use at their desk to solve all the math problems. The focus for the first few weeks is simply in getting them to understand equivalent fractions in the 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 realm. From there, we'll add in other fractions. But they are working exclusively with these for right now, and they have been for the last few weeks.

Yesterday, though, we switched from thinking about fractions in terms of strips to thinking about fractions in circles. This was a quantum leap for my students that the series took for granted. The circles plus the addition of glue to the problem-solving process made it impossible to accomplish much.

I started out the class asking the students to get their supplies: scissors and glue. These are middle school students, but the glue just put them over the edge. I turned my back for a second, and I turned back around to find four girls gluing random things to their notebooks. Whooooaaaa. Put a stop to that. Then we got into the actual lesson.

Now the book really is normally pretty straight-forward. There are step-by-step examples at the top of every page for the students to follow. The directions yesterday were pretty simple. They were solving problems about sharing cookies. For example, at the top of the page, it would say, "4 people share 3 cookies equally." And then the kids had to figure out how to divide those three cookies among four boxes on their paper. The three cookies were represented by circular pieces of paper, and they could cut those to make sure that everyone got the same amount.

The directions at the top of the page listed these steps:
1. Take the number of cookies in the problem.
2. Share the cookies equally.
3. Paste and label the cookies.
4. Write the sentence at the bottom of the page.
And there was a pictorial representation to go with this to explain what happens in each step.

I went through two examples with the kids. I did one on the board. We did one together. Then, I asked them to get to work and do three problems on their own.

All hell broke loose.

One student started randomly gluing "cookies" to her page without actually counting how many were needed in the problem.
One student started working on the back page of the packet--the part of the packet that I had photocopied for Monday's practice.
One student did step one but then skipped to step three without bothering to try to share the cookies first. Person number four was left out in the cold with no cookies on her sheet.
One student, my most advanced, started thinking in terms of dividing the cookies in half and then the remaining halves into fourths. No problem. Except his brother, who was sitting next to him, was watching and trying to copy without understanding why.
One student, when labeling, forgot all the rules of fractions and counted up the total number of pieces on his board (12--each cookie divided into four pieces) and labeled each cookie part as 1/12 even though we've never seen that fraction before.

I intervened as a class when I realized things were going wrong. Then I intervened individually as I could. Then I just lost my ever-loving mind and put a stop to the whole thing and sent them out of the room to their next teacher so that I could regroup and figure out where the heck I had gone wrong.  I figured out several things:

1. Never, ever, ever include glue in a project without telling the kids that they have to ask before they glue.
2. Never assume that kids can make a transition from one thing (the fraction strips) to another (the circle) without checking for understanding first.
3. Always check your teacher materials in advance to make sure that you have what you need, the kids have what they need, and the papers that you think are there are actually there. When I did the examples with the kids yesterday, I thought that they had papers in their packets to do the examples with me, and they didn't.
4. Feel free to add an extra step in there that will help the students. I should have required them to divide ALL circles into fourths before sharing out their cookies. And then they could have figured out whether they had wholes or not.
5. Don't be afraid to lay on the floor on the classroom moaning and groaning as a means of personal therapy while teaching. Kids find it endearing that you are suffering for them. (And they'll ask you questions while you are laying there anyway).