As of 2015, Michelle Makinson had taught fourth grade for 11 years at Bagby Elementary School in San José, California.
Her learning segment contains three days of instruction focused on building students’ understanding of unit fractions, how fractions get put together to create a whole, and what it means if the wholes of ______ are different sizes. In the lesson, Michelle also starts to move students toward understanding the concept of equivalence. She emphasizes multiple representations of fractions: area and set models, verbal representations, numerical representations, number line representations, and contextualized representations or word problems.
In her teaching, Michelle makes extensive use of formative assessment data to help her make instructional and curricular decisions. She says “My data is based on daily quizzes that are specific to each standard within the Common Core math standards. I stole these with great glee from Howard County, which has a wiki for every single grade level. We do one of each of those quizzes every day. They have a lot of similarities to the MARS tasks in terms of a ramping up.”
