This session is designed to explore how explicit and targeted writing instruction can foster students' ability to "show their thinking" during math lessons.
While implementing higher-order thinking tasks in my third grade math lessons, I found that, while students could mark up a page with drawings and equations, they struggled to use written words to explain how they arrived at their answer. Written answers were either very short, e.g. "I used number line" or "did mental math" or nonexistent. Given the importance of clear communication in the "connect" stage of the five practices, I decided to design a two week long writing unit that would explicitly teach procedural writing skills in relation to math problem solving. In this session, I will share my unit outline and discuss its alignment to the 6 Traits of Writing curriculum . We will also consider the link between sequential writing and algorithmic thinking and look at students writing samples together.
