In this section, you will find strategies that teachers can use to help students summarize what they have learned after a lesson. Teachers can also utilize these strategies to evaluate student understanding.
By incorporating writing into all content areas, students become better able to express thier thoughts and reasoning in multiple ways. By using writing afte a lesson, students are required to sort the information they have learned and make connections between ideas. It is important, expecially in math, that students can answer a question using conventional symbols, but it is also necessary that students are able to explain how they determined the answers. Post Lesson activities that incorporate writing give students the opportunity to do just that.
The following activity is titled "Someone Wanted But So." This strategy impacts learning by requiring students to take concepts they have learned in the previous lesson and explore cause and effect between those ideas. This is extremely beneficial in math classrooms. By using this as a post lesson activity, teachers are helping students express the process behind mathematical processes while determining the answer.
The sample worksheet requires students to review Order of Operations. A sample expression is provided in the left most column and an operation is included. Students must explain what the operation wants to do (its function), why it cannot perform its function, and how to solve the problem. Students should be encouraged to provide creative reasoning.
Someone Wanted But So
Adapted from:
Somebody-wanted-but-so. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2009, from http://wvde.state.wv.us/strategybank/Somebody-Wanted-But-So.html
Connection to GPS:
M6N1. Students will understand the meaning of the four arithmetic operations as
related to positive rational numbers and will use these concepts to solve
problems.
