This three-day workshop series will focus on planning effective lessons to improve student success in working with fractions. You will bring your textbooks and curriculum documents and you will leave with several lessons (and corresponding assessments) that focus on teaching for understanding. There will also be homework between sessions that will require you to develop a portion of a lesson, teach that portion, do a reflection activity related to the lesson, and bring it all back to the next session. This series provides you with opportunities to carefully analyze corresponding GLCE, to use a model to develop lesson plans that include differing instructional strategies, to develop or select the activities and resources you need to implement your planned lessons, and to select formative and summative assessments to track your students’ progress. These three days are packed with teacher-collaboration and hands-on development and exploration.

Rationale: Students having a strong background in fractions: what they are, how to represent and compare them, and how to combine them in application helps to ensure they successfully develop proportional and algebraic reasoning in upper grades. However, students typically struggle with key concepts of fractions. Evidence of students’ lack of mastery is found in the Kalamazoo County 2008 MEAP data which shows that students were weakest in working with fractions [and data - see related workshop offering] in grades 2 and 3.