What strengths, capacities, and interests, in terms of their content understanding (prior knowledge), academic and literacy development, personal and cultural abilities, and development as a learning community, are you taking into account in planning this unit?

Students have just completed two units on addition and subtraction, and the class did really well in both post-unit tests. I am confident that the students have the background knowledge to move onto fact families and addition with three numbers, and I want to start to expand their knowledge into understanding the similarities between the two operations.

What particular needs of your students—academic, social, personal, language (ELLs)—have you taken into account in planning the unit? What will they need to be able to do in order to meet the learning goals?

I know that for some of my students it will be very difficult to understand that with addition you put two parts together to make a whole, and for subtraction you need to subtract from the whole. I will provide plenty of manipulatives for students to explore what happens when you subtract from a smaller number, like dominos, counters, and unifix cubes. I will also provide support at my teacher’s table, and scaffold the worksheets as needed. I will continue to refer back to my poem, and model both the right and wrong way to complete these problems. I hope that the repeated exposure helps students learn what to do and why it makes sense.

Explain how research and best practice ideas have informed your plan.

I will model all of my lessons before students have go off to try them. I will provide the opportunity for my students to think and talk about these concepts with each other, so they have more opportunities to process the information. For my students I think it is most important to present this information in multiple ways so they can access it.

A lot of the lesson is supported by Christine Moynihan’s book Math Sense: The Look, Sound, and Feel of Effective Instruction, in her chapters “The Look of the Lesson: Students,” and “The Sound of the Lesson.” It is important that my students work together and problem-solve, listen well to each other, and defend their ideas. I want students to build off of previous knowledge and apply it to their work with fact families, to solve the four equations. Similarly, for adding three numbers, they should build off of what they know about addition to solve the equation. Lastly, students are working with each other, collaborating to play games or solve each other’s equations. There is ownership and pride in their work, and an excitement to see their work displayed in the class.