Welcome to my Unit! April 18, 2010

Welcome to my website about creating a mathematical unit with the underlying theme of global poverty. This website has 4 categories which allow you to easily navigate through the various elements of the unit. Under “All About the Unit” you can read in more detail what the unit entails and the rational for it, as well as understand the class that it was intended for. There is also a list of required materials under this category. The second category is titled “Lesson Plans”. Here you will find 10 1 hour lesson plans that outline in detail the various steps that each lesson contains. In the third category called “Evaluation of Students” you will be able to access all of the student handouts required for the lessons, as well as a brief rational for the evaluation and assessment practices. The last category of the website is “Personal Reflection” and it contains my self-reflection on the unit and project. Alternatively, instead of using the categories, you can simply scroll down this homepage and see each of the postings in order chronologically.

I hope that you enjoy my website and my unit!

The Topic April 12, 2010

The title for this unit is called Understanding Global Poverty Through Numbers. One important concept in the mathematics section of grade 6 curriculum requires that students understand number concepts; this includes large numbers up to 10 digits, decimals, and even percentages. To make these numbers more meaningful for students I have chosen to relate them to global poverty; a topic that is extremely prevalent in all forms of our media.

Living and teaching in a country that is as stable as ours is a luxury that many of us take for granted. This mathematics unit seeks to introduce students to the global poverty issues around them, and to help make sense of some of the startling and unfathomable statistics that they hear about. Knowing that 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, or that 121 million children worldwide do not attend school are complex facts to comprehend. With this unit I hope to teach students about key numerical concepts, while at the same time helping them to put these alarming numbers into perspective so that they can appreciate their very blessed lives.

The unit will rely heavily on technology by asking the students to use laptops and a SMARTboard, however, will also be based on various forms of print media as well.

Meet the Class

While planning this unit I had a certain classroom setting in mind that I tried to picture myself teaching in. The school is private and is located in an upper-class suburban and English neighborhood in Toronto. The reason for selecting this type of school is that this is the kind of school setting that I grew up in myself, and the type of atmosphere that I hope to one day teach in.

The age group that I had in mind while planning this unit is a cycle 3 grade 6 class. Due to the upper-class neighborhood in which the school is located, the classroom would be well equipped with resources. This includes laptops for each student, a SMARTboard at the front of the class, and access to the internet as well as internet subscription resources.

For this project I envisioned a small class of only about 20 students who were all very comfortable with technology. Both teacher and student depend heavily on their laptops, and use the SMARTboard for most lessons. They also rely heavily on the internet for things such as research, projects, and web based activities. Each of the students is confident when it comes time to using any Microsoft office outlet, as well as internet based software such as Voicethread or WordPress.

Materials

While each lesson has its own specific list of materials that need to be used, there are several important things that will be needed and used throughout the unit. These include:

• Access to laptops (at least 1 per pair)
• Access to the internet
• A SMARTboard
• Ability to use an common open space on the last day of the unit (ex. a gym or library)
  

Lesson 1 – What Do We Know About Poverty? April 7, 2010

The first lesson of the unit will act as both an engaging starting point for the students as well as  review of what they have learned about number concepts in previous years.

The following materials will be needed for the lesson: (please note that the numbers are based on a class of 20 students, but can be adapted to any sized class)

-Post-it notes (10)

-small pieces of folded paper (4 with a $ sign, 6 with the number 10, 7 with the number 2.50, and 3 with the number 1)

-a container to place the folded papers

-KWL chart for SmartBoard presentation

Below are the following parts of the lesson which is expected to take approximately 1 hour to complete.

1. To catch the student’s attention at the beginning of the lesson there will be a short introductory activity. Before the students enter the classroom place a post-its on half of the desks in the room.
2. As the students walk into class tell them not to touch their post-its and also have each student select one of the folded pieces of paper from the container. Remind them not to open the papers until they are asked.
3. Once everyone has taken their seats ask the students who have a post-it note on their desk to stand-up. Once they have done so ask the class to guess why they think they are standing; what do they represent? Take approximately 3 guesses and move on.
4. If no one has guessed the right response, tell the students that the students who are standing represent the number of children world wide who live in poverty. Ask the students the following series of questions: (the correct responses are in red.
   1. How many of their classmates are currently standing? 10
   2. How many people are in our class in total? 20
   3. So what percentage of our class is “living in poverty”? 50%
      
   4. Does anyone know the number of children in the world? (take a few guesses before moving on) 2.2 billion
   5. How would we say 2.2 billion in it’s standard form? How would we write it? (have a volunteer use the board to do this). 2,200,000
      
   6. If our class is representing the number of children living in poverty world wide, and the total number of children is 2.2 billion, how many children in the world live in poverty? 1.1 billion or 1,100,000
5. For the next small introductory activity ask the students to open their small pieces of folded paper. Ask the students whose paper has either a 10, 2.50, or a 1 on it to stand up. Those who have a $ on their paper should remain sitting. 16 students should be standing in total.
   
6. Ask the students the following series of questions:
   1. How many people in our class our standing right now? 16 (write this number on the board)
      
   2. How many people are in our class in total? 20(write this number on the board)
   3. How can I figure out what percentage of the class is currently standing? Divide 16 into 20
   4. So what percentage of the class is up? 80%
7. Inform them that this represents the number of people in the world who are living on less than $10 per day. Ask the students to raise their hands if they think that their they and their family spends more than $10 per day?
8. Ask the students who have a 10 on their paper to be seated. People with only 2.50 and 1 should remain standing.
   
9. Ask the students the following series of questions:
   1. How many people in the class are still standing? 10
      
   2. How can we figure out what percentage of the class that is? Divide by 20
   3. So what percentage of our class is still standing? 50%
10. Tell the students that 50% of the world lives on less than $2.50 per day. Ask them how many of them think they spend more than $2.50 a day?
11. Next ask the students who have 2.50 on their papers to be seated. Only 3 students should still be standing and each should have the number 1 on their paper.
    
12. Ask the students the following questions:
    1. How many people are still standing? 3
    2. What percentage of our class is that? (get a volunteer do the math on the board if they need to) 15%
13. Tell the students that the people who are still standing represent the number of people in the world who live on less than $1 per day.
    
14. You may now ask the few remaining students to sit back down, and ask the students to briefly Think, Pair, Share on this introductory activity with the person beside them. Think, Pair, Share is an activity that requires the students to reflect quickly on what they got out of this activity, then join together with the person sitting beside them and share their response with them. After a few minutes, they will then be asked to share their joint reflections with the class. The think and pair portion of this activity should take no more than 5-6 minutes.
    
15. Once the students have had time to share with their partner, ask a few groups to share their reflections aloud. Where they surprised? Scared? Worried? or confused by these facts? Allow this portion of the discussion to take about 10 minutes.
    
16. Once a few pairs have shared turn on the SMARTboard and bring up the KWL chart. The students should have seen one of these before, so there is no need to explain how it works. In the Know column, ask students to brainstorm about what they already know about poverty. They can include some of the information that they have just learned today. Continue filling in the column until there are no more student responses.
    
17. For the next column on the chart students will tell you what they want to learn about poverty. This question will help lead their learning, and also help you to see what kinds of questions they would like answered during the unit. Continue filling in this column until there are no more responses.
    
18. To close the lesson tell students that you will be printing out an enlarged KWL chart to post on the wall of the classroom. This will guide their learning throughout the unit, and help them to visualize what they have learned.
    
19. For homework, instruct the students to visit the UNICEF website and read at least three of the “Real Life Stories” from children living in poverty around the world. The link is as follows:

http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/education/explore_218.html

20. Give the students a few minutes to write down the website address, and have them double check with a friend beside them to make sure that they have copied it down correctly.

Lesson 2 – Getting Comfortable with BIG numbers April 6, 2010

Now that the students have been introduced to the unit, it is time to take a few steps back and get them comfortable using numbers with up to 10 digits. For this lesson we are going to continue using statistics about world poverty, however, this lesson will have a much stronger emphasis on the mathematical concepts. For this lesson students will be comparing poverty statistics from Canada and another country of their choice. For this lesson students will be primarily using the UNstats Millennium Indicators website http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx

For this lesson you will need the following:

-Laptop for each student with internet access

-A blackboard or SMARTboard

The following lesson is expected to take approximately an hour to complete and these steps outline the procedure.

1. To start the lesson have students voluntarily share what they learned from their homework on the UNICEF website. Ask them to share their reflections and allow them to add any questions to the KWL chart that their homework may have raised. This portion of the lesson should take no more than 10 minutes.

2. They will be then be given a few minutes to get their laptops set up . They should be reminded that their laptop lids should be down for this portion of the lesson.

3. The teacher will begin instruction at this point of the lesson; reviewing how to subtract, add and divide with large numbers. To do this bring up the website http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/default.aspx and project the website onto the SMARTboard for everyone to follow along with. Scroll down the page and on the left hand side there will be a list of countries to click on. Tell them that as an example you will be selecting the United States. Click on the blue link and on the following page click on “series data”. This page will bring up a whole list of statistics on the USA from 1990 to 2007.

4. The first step will be to find the total population of children in the United States. 73.7 million.

5. Next, scroll down partway down the page and find the short section on education. The total percentage of primary age children enrolled in school was 93.7 in 2007. Circle this number on the SMARTboard so that the students can see it clearly. Ask the students to tell you how they might go about finding out how many people that is. Do the work on the board for them as they instruct you what to do.  They will need to multiply 0.937 by 73.7 million to find out that 69,056,900 children are enrolled in primary school.

6. Using the same population figures and the UN website figure out, as a class, how many girls are enrolled in primary school. 69,572,800.

7. Continue and find out the number of boys enrolled.  68,541,000

8. Next, ask the students to instruct you on how to find out how many more girls, than boys, are enrolled in primary education. 10,31,800

9. The last activity in this lesson will require students to open their laptops and navigate to the same website page as they did together on the board. They will be asked to pick a country of their choice to compare with Canada’s enrollment rate of education.

10. They will be given time in class to complete a worksheet with their information, and what is not completed in class will be required to do for homework. A link to the assignment sheet is here: http://wp.me/pSXs0-1h

Lesson 2 Student Activity Sheet April 5, 2010

A copy of this handout can also be found in a word file from the following link: UN Stats Activity Sheet

The activity sheet will be taken up in the following class and will also be collected for assessment. The rational behind using this kind of activity is because I wanted the students to be able to explore some poverty facts on their own while using mathematical concepts that should be review from their previous years of schooling. After reviewing the concepts briefly as a class I wanted to make sure that the students were able to complete the math problems on their own without assistance so as to ensure that when we move on in the following lessons they will be able to keep up. I have also used this assessment to allow students to explore other countries that may suffer from poverty, and to think up various reasons on their own for why certain students may not attend school just as they do. By offering them the chance to think about it and do some brief research on their own they are participating in discovery learning which we can then discuss as a class.

Lesson 3 – Dealing with the Decimal April 4, 2010

In the last lesson students reviewed how to add, subtract, and multiply with billions and millions, and also dealt with percentages. Today’s lesson will be based on the decimal and new concepts will be introduced about place values and algorithms.The numbers that the class will be using will be based on the previous nights homework assignment.

The 3rd lesson of this unit will require the following materials:

-the UN Stats activity sheet (each student’s copy as well as the SMARTboard document)

-student math notebooks and pencils

-a decimal place value charts (can be drawn on a blackboard or the image below can be projected onto the SMARTboard)

-SMARTboard document with adding and subtracting decimals instructions (see image below)

The following steps outline the lesson and it should take approximately 1 hour to complete:

1. Have the students take out the homework sheet from the previous night. Inform them that we will not be correcting it today, however, we will will be using the information that they have gathered to learn about decimals and place value.

2. Briefly discuss with the class what kinds of information they found while doing the activity. What countries did they select? Were there more or less children enrolled in education? Where boys or girls more likely to be enrolled? This discussion should take no more than 5 minutes.

3. On the SMARTboard, bring up the image of the place value table. It should not be filled in as the students will help you do this aloud.

4. Ask the students if they can remember seeing something like this before? Hopefully they have and you can remind them it is called a place value chart and they have used it for both whole numbers and decimals before.

5. The decimal should already be on the image, but ask the students to help you fill in the other parts of the table by asking the following questions.

1. What is the column called directly in front of the decimal? Ones
2. What is the column called directly after the decimal? Tenths
3. What about the column after that one? Hundredths
4. And the last column is called? Thousandths

6. Once the chart is filled in ask students to return to their activity sheet handout and find a number that contains a decimal. Give them the clue that it is likely in one of their percentages. Have a volunteer share their number by writing it in the place value chart at the front of the room.

7. Ask for a few more volunteers to share their numbers and practice saying the numbers aloud as a class. Do this for approximately 5-7 minutes.

8. Once a few volunteers have come up keep one of the decimal numbers on the board and extend the place value chart to look like so:
9. Now ask the students to help you fill in the extra 2 columns on the table. Tens and Ten Thousandths

10. With the decimal number still in the chart, ask the students how you can fill in the extra two columns. Inform them that we cannot simply leave them empty and must put a number in there. Have them take a few guesses at numbers until the number 0 is said.

11. Now that students are comfortable with the place values in decimals, we will now begin practicing adding and subtracting with them. Pair students with the person beside them and ask them to take out the math notebooks.

12. Once they are settled place the following instructions up on the SMARTboard.13. Allow students to work with the partners for approximately 15-20 minutes. Circulate the room to answer questions during this period.

14. To finish the lesson bring everyone’s attention back to the SMARTboard. Tell the students that you are going to take a few examples and do them together on the board. Ask some student pairs to share their decimals and work with the class. They can come up to the board to show their numbers in the place value chart and their subtraction work.

15. The homework from this lesson will be to ask a parent how much, on average, they usually spend at the grocery store per visit.

16. Their work they conducted in their workbook will not be collected for assessment or evaluation. It will simply be for their own practice and the teacher should have been circulating during the assignment to assess how each student was doing.

Lesson 4 – Putting it into Perspective April 3, 2010

Today’s lesson will use decimals to really help students understand what it means to live in poverty. Now that we have reviewed adding, subtracting and place value with decimals, students will be using dollar amounts to help put living on $1 or $10 a day into perspective.

For this lesson you will need:

-Flyers from grocery stores (1 per student)

-small piece of scrap paper for each student

-a container to collect the pieces of scrap papers

-a notebook for students to work in with a pencil

The steps for this lesson are as follows and should take approximately 1 hour to complete:

1. As the students come in have them write the amount that their parents usually spend on groceries per visit on a small piece of scrap paper.

2. Once everyone has written down their number have them fold it so that the number is hidden. Then have a volunteer collect all of the papers and place them in a container.

3. Once all of the papers are collected have the volunteer go around the room again and have each student collect a different paper from the container. This short procedure is to ensure that students are not embarrassed or ashamed about how much or how little their family spends at the store; this way all of the amounts are arbitrary.

4. Next, have a volunteer hand out various grocery flyers. One should go to each student. Now tell the students that they are going to go shopping. Keeping in mind how much they have to spend at the store (the amount that was given to them on the paper), they will have to select items from the flyer until they reach that number (or approximately that amount). During this process they will have to keep track of how much money they have already spent by adding up their decimal amounts. Give students approximately 20 minutes to do this portion of the activity. During this time the teacher should be circulating to make sure that students are adding and subtracting their decimals correctly.

5. After most students have spent most of their money ask them what kinds of things they were able to buy and how much they spent. Have a few volunteers talk but do this for only 5 minutes since the most important part of the activity is yet to come.

6. Inform students that now they will have to think back to the first lesson. Have the students remember what dollar amount they had on their paper a few classes ago. There should be 6 people with $10, 7 people with $2.50, and 3 people with $1. The remaining 4 people will get to choose between $10, $2.50, or $1.

7. Give the students time now to go back through their grocery store flyer and pick out as many items as they can without going over their dollar amount. Remind them that they are trying to make the most of their money, so try and encourage them to buy as many items as they can. Provide students with approximately 15 minutes to do this portion of the activity. During this time they should be adding and subtracting decimals just as they were before. The teacher should also be circulating the class at this time.

8. Once everyone has spent all of their money get everyone’s attention back to the front of the room. Have a brief discussion about what kinds of things they were able to buy. Do they think that that would be able to fill an entire families appetite? Was was they were able to buy nutritious? Continue this discussion until the end of class.

9. There will be no  evaluation for this lesson because the teacher should have been assessing student progress during their seat work. The student homework for this class will be to visit the following website and read about using the media to take action: http://www.unicef.org/voy/takeaction/takeaction_381.html

Lesson 5 – Taking Action April 2, 2010

Lesson five will take a slight break from the core concepts of the mathematics unit to introduce the overall project for the unit. For homework the students were asked to visit the UNICEF Take Action website and read about incorporating the media successfully into a fund-raising project. The emphasis on this lesson will be to take what they have learned from that site to develop our own poverty educational fair within the school.

What you will need for this lesson:

-A handout of the instruction sheet (one for each student and one to be projected on the SMARTboard) – provided below

-Laptop (at least 1 per group)

The following instruction sheet will be provided for the students. This lesson is expected to take 1 hour.

1. As students walk in the room give them a number between 1 and 5. Tell them to remember their number.

2. Once students are seated ask them to take their laptop, a notebook, and a pencil and find their classmates who have the same number as them.Ask them to find a place to sit together and give them a few minutes to set up their laptops and workspace.

3. Bring up the project instruction sheet on the SMARTboard and get a student volunteer to hand out a copy to each student. A copy of this sheet is below: 

This image can be found in a document by following the link here: Understanding Poverty through Numbers

4. Go through the instruction sheet very carefully with the students. Answer any questions that they may have. Assure them that they will have time to work on these various elements in class time over the next 4 classes.This should take approximately 30 minutes to explain.

5. For the last part of class allow students to work independently with their group to brainstorm ideas. Remind them that they can use the internet and should take some useful ideas from both what we have done in class and also what they have learned from the homework readings. Emphasize that they need to target both adults and younger students and that their goal is to make this issue relate-able and understandable.

6. During this independent group period the teacher should be circulating the room and ensuring that students are on track with their ideas.

7. The homework for this class should be to finalize their groups overall idea for the project and to begin any initial research that they may need. Remind them that they should bring anything that they work on at home back to school everyday so that they can use it in class.