How will implementing math stations affect math achievement in my third grade classroom?

Seminar Title

How will implementing math stations affect math achievement in my third grade classroom?

Math Workshop and Stations

3rd Grade

Elementary

Mathematics

Mathematics

“Why do we need to know this?” How often do we hear this when it comes to math? I am excited to present my research on how to make your math time more engaging and fun for students. With implementing engaging activities using math stations and allowing your students some choice your students are sure to enjoy math more. They will take on ownership of their learning with provided choices of ways to practice math. I let me students choose between different math manipulatives, fluency practice, and math games to get them engaged and have some choice in what they wanted to practice.I was thrilled with the outcomes and academic progress my third graders made with this implementation!

Abstract James Malyuk Duluth Blended II Learning Community jdmaly16@smumn.edu How will implementing math stations affect math achievement in my third grade classroom? The question guiding my research is as follows: How will implementing math stations affect math achievement in my third grade classroom? As a result I chose to find more engaging activities, mainly math manipulatives and let the students take on a little ownership of what they wanted to learn. This has been a huge problem for my students in previous years and is why I chose to focus on it. A review of literature outlines my journey of tackling this topic. Understanding the child’s brain was an obvious starting point when it comes to maintaining focus. From there I learned of different ways I can keep the student focus and achieve an optimal amount of learning during math. I also instilled a form of math stations that was more structured for the students. This gave the students some choice but also let me control the learning to a good degree. By focusing around all of this, my hope was to have more engaged students during math and to reach a higher level of learning with my third graders. After doing my research, I have come up with the idea to change my math workshop into more of a stations time including math manipulatives and allowing students to have some choice in which games they play and with what manipulatives they would like to use. In doing so, my students will take ownership of their learning and be more engaged during math. Implementing all of this took much longer than I initially thought with third graders. We had to not only set expectations and introduce the different math activities but we also had to practice each one repeatedly. It was my hope to eventually move from two stations of 15 minutes to three stations of 10 minutes but that just will not happen by the time my research is completed. We have stuck to the two stations of learning for 15 minutes for the duration of my research. For my data I have chose to collect district data along with my own quizzes and tests to analyze. All data suggests this was a positive change for my students with significant increases in both pre and post tests as well as our district administered assessments. In concluding this research I have noticed a higher level of engagement than expected and have really liked the results academically in reference to my student scores. All of them have been making tremendous gains and seem to have a growing confidence in math. In response to the question of level of enegagement, I have noticed more students engaged in what they are doing and having more fun while doing math.