We had a full day of inservice on mathematics in reading, which was better than I expected. Since I do a lot of professional development, especially in Connected Math, I wasn’t looking forward to doing this, but the literacy information was helpful. We were working on vocabulary strategies, and going through the division problem from Bits and Pieces 2 was good. I never realized just how fine the line is with sharing and grouping when it comes to division. In fact, I never realized until just recently that there was a difference. Quite a lot of finesse to those words, and two different situations. I was concerned about spending that amount of time on two vocabulary words, only to find out that there is a lot of prior knowledge build in Bits 1.

The great thing about Connected Math is the building of prior knowledge; the problem is that until you teach the units, you don’t really see how everything fits together. Which is what the district is refusing to see, especially when it comes to my school and having to show immediate progress this year in math scores.

Overall, an interesting day. I want to have more time to plan my lessons, so I can really begin to incorporate the strategies I have been learning.