The Participants

My Students & The Community Need

The students I worked with at my placement, like many, believe that math has no real-life value. These students tend to struggle to stay awake during our morning ELT (extra learning time) because of their lack of sleep and their belief that mathematics is not interesting. I know that this group is very active about taking initiative and helping, as I always have a volunteer whenever there is a task that needs to be done. Since I am only with this group of students on Mondays and Wednesdays, I knew that I wanted to show them how valuable and enjoyable mathematics can be.

Since I was a practicum student only there twice a week and the class was primarily led by my mentor teacher, I chose the community issue with my students’ interests in mind. I knew that my students love to help others and appreciate the when the class activities let them collaborate and engage in creativity, so I reached out to a teacher in the special education department at the middle school and asked her if stories about unit pricing would be beneficial since they go shopping at the grocery store each week. She was pleased to hear about this idea and agreed that her class would enjoy reading about a relevant math topic before shopping, and found it beneficial that the books were created by students learning the material. I then created a plan to have my students utilize their knowledge of unit prices to create math short stories that would be delivered to her class. The students in Ms. Thomas class have low incidence disabilities, but are very involved at the middle school and cook lunch for the teachers once a week. Our stories involved the ingredients that Ms. Thomas' class shopped for at the grocery store the week we delivered them, and they read the stories and learned about unit pricing before they went to look for these items. Our books helped my students and Ms. Thomas' students to engage in mathematical literacy and what it means to purchase an item for cheaper because of a lower unit price.

The Participants & Student Voice

I chose to work with my ELT sixth grade students in my field placement classroom. This group worked on a project that's primary goal was to benefit the special education department at the same middle school. Because of the proximity of these classrooms, the groups are a part of the same city and cluster, yet at different points in their lives. They may not have the exact same experiences, but they have all struggled with learning a new skill at some point in their lives. This initiative was beneficial for the students to see the effects their work has on the recipients when we completed our service-learning efforts.

The participants of this project include myself, my ELT class, assistance from my mentor teacher, Ms. Thomas and her class. My ELT class worked in pairs to create short stories (one per pair) to help Ms. Thomas' students learn unit rates before shopping at the grocery store for their class activity. By encouraging creativity and student voice, my students did everything from brainstorm ideas to construct the physical story. My primary role was to facilitate the process and answering any questions that my students had. The recipient class was able to read these books when they were introduced to unit rates for the first time.

I let my students choose who they wanted to work with which was not a normal occurrence in the classroom I was placed in, and I was pleased to see my students engaging in conversations about math with their peers. By not setting an immense about of boundaries for the story books, the students were able to use their voice and choice with their partner to conduct a plan on how they wanted to implement the math strategy into the literature. They create the book from scratch, for they chose how to orientate the book pages all the way to the last sentence of the story. I did ask that my students check in with me before writing the final copy of the story into the book and drawing the pictures, so that I could approve its level of appropriateness before it was in its final product form. I knew that if my students had an idea about the process they will voice it to me, and I was excited to see them choose characters like Cardi B or Beyonce and write about people they value in relation to math.