Blog #7 - What are the "official" goals and objectives of your Change Project?

My change project's main goal is to increase my kindergartners' mathematics skills.  The project uses quality children's literature as the "hook" (interest builder) for all math concepts.  Lessons are then written to match the book and concepts.  The goal is to have at least 70% proficient on the end of the year I-Ready assessment.  This will mean more than a year's growth for just over 75% of them. The beginning of the year scale score average was 351.



For example, the first topic was sorting.  The first day was a free sort of buttons, about 15 per child.  Most children sorted by color or size.  When asked to sort another way, they just looked at me.  They could not conceptualize doing it another way.  The second day the book The Button Box was read.  We then used a bubble map to mention all of the way the boy sorted his grandmother's buttons.  The third day we used the buttons to sort them again anyway they wanted.  We shared how we did it.  This time when I said sort them again another way, they could.  In fact they wanted to keep sorting them as many ways as they could find.  We also reread the book and looked to our map to see if we "missed" anything. Overall the first unit was a success!  I had more verbalization and attribute awareness than ever before.  Another kindergarten teacher at my school, who is also trying my ideas, said this was the easiest year in all her years of kindergarten (about 20 I believe) to teach sorting.  My students were able to transfer this knowledge to sorting shells, Chex Mix, Fruit Loops, and Legos.