Grade 3-5

How to Make a Unit Documentation Book

Grade 3-5, Grade K-2

Before I answer the question of how to make a unit documentation book, let me first share a little about what a unit documentation book is. A documentation book shows the flow of the unit over time from the beginning to the end of the student’s journey and engagement with a Unit of Inquiry. It is a place for photos, writing, ideas, and wonderings to be recorded, and it is a shared space between the students and the teacher. It is visual and portable: a tool for learning. There is no “right way” to make a unit documentation book, and therefore in labeling this post “how to make” my intention is simply to inspire creativity and share in the various ways I’ve used this type of book. The most important thing is that this book becomes a meaningful canvas for learning to happen.

There’s really only two steps in the how-

Choose your canvas: I’ve found an oversize poster paper book works well as it is easy for students to see during carpet time and large enough for multiple students to use at the same time during other engagements.

Visually document your unit of inquiry, starting from the beginning. Here’s where the magic happens- where true creativity can occur to construct meaning. The options for documenting are endless but here are some you might consider using for your unit documentation book.

  1. Document Quotes After an Engagement

Document students ideas as visual quotes after a learning engagement. The learning engagement could be independent learning time (such as open inquiry) or it could be a group lesson where students demonstrated understanding of a topic. Reflect with the students on their learning as a class community, discuss how each quote connects to the key or related concepts from the unit. Visually mark the related concepts and use photos to support student understanding.

2. Unpack Unit Concepts Together

Unpack unit concepts, compare them and/or define them together. Record student examples and ideas to review a concept and the come up with a class definition or use a students idea as a definition for the team. Discuss with students the similarities and differences of the terms.

3. Map a Main Idea or Storyline

Review the main idea or learning from a text read together. After reading a story together connected to the unit, consider what new vocabulary or concept you want students to understand. In the picture on the right, I wanted my students to between understand what causes an object to change the way it is moving.

4. Explore a Learning Theory

Unpack a learning theory together. For a theory that students are particularly challenged by, write it down and reflect together considering all perspectives. Consider first playing the game, “take sides” where students stand on one side of the carpet if they agree with the statement, the other side of the carpet if they disagree with the statement or in the middle if they are undecided. Afterwards make the learning visual and reflect further!

5. Do a little bit of everything!

Again there is no right way or wrong way to use this type of book. On this page on the right I started by showing the students the direction of the “push” force. One of the pushes shows a short distance for an object to move, the other push shows a longer distance for the object to move. Students described these pushes in different ways, however no student used the word “distance” therefore this was our “pre-learning” page on distance, to come back to once students deepened their understanding of how distance can impact forces.

Welcome Weeks

Grade 3-5, Grade K-2

In the welcome weeks of the school year, my main goal is to get to know my students. Another goal, is for my students to make the connection that in order to achieve any hopes and dreams they might have for the year, we must create a safe space that encourages risk-taking and accepts mistakes. At the school I currently teach at, we have 5 Core Values: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. These core values are what students live by to represent the school’s mission. But how do you create a class space where each of these values is the norm? 

To start off this mini-unit for the welcome weeks of school, we talked about culture as a class. We brainstormed what we think of when we think of the word culture and came up with a class definition for the word. My classes definition was “traditions and behavior that is passed on within a group of people.” With this definition, we determined that a culture could apply to a smaller group or community, like we have in the classroom. I next wrote up the following 5 statements, each on a separate large sheet paper throughout the room. 

1. Write what color a culture of compassion reminds you of and why (use that color!).

2. Draw an image that shows what a culture of respect looks lik

3. Describe a time that you were responsible or saw someone else being responsible.

4. Write a short phrase you would hear in a culture of honesty.

5. Draw a symbol that you believe represents a culture of fairness. 

Having the students rotate through these posters in small groups and write down their ideas in this visible thinking exercise really paid off. The students were creative in their responses, had rationale for their ideas, and were open about their experiences. As a wrap-up to this activity, I gave each student a sticky-note. I told them that on that sticky note they were to write down one idea from someone else that they liked from any one of the posters.  When we gathered back together as a class, the kids shared the one idea they liked out-loud. Each student then stuck his or her sticky-note  on the front board. We used these sticky notes as a tool in helping us build our class essential agreement. 

Graphing Extension: Jo Boaler Lesson

Grade 3-5, Math

Take a look at the image on the left. What do you notice? You may recognize this image to be a graph. You may also know that this graph comes from a lesson written by inquiry mathematics advocate Jo Boaler. Boaler’s goal in her lesson, is for students to understand that graphs show comparisons. However, you’ll notice one difference between the image on the left and the image Boaler uses in her lesson plan. In this image, I have taken out the labels on the axis. My reasoning? Because I believed my students could figure that part out themselves.  

I asked the following set of questions to my 4th grade classes.

Sample Student Work
  • What can you tell me about this image? 
  • What would you label the axises? 
  • Where would you place a zebra? What about a dog?

Not only were my students able to correctly label the axises, but they also were able to infer where a dog and where a zebra would be appropriately placed on the graphs. Interestingly, each group had their own perspective as to where a “dog” and where a “zebra” would go providing opportunity for a unique classroom discussion on perspective. There can be different breeds of dogs, so why couldn’t this be placed differently!

Good inquiry mathematics stretches with the ideas of the children in the classroom. We took this one day exercise and turned it into a 3-day math project, as students wanted to create their own graphs similar to Jo Boaler’s animal one. My students researched topics such as flags of countries and weights of planets, and built their own graphs comparing and contrasting areas of interest. While starting off as just a math lesson, this project grew to incorporate geography, science, and social studies into math.

Some examples of my student’s final graphs. They wanted to leave the axis’s off to have other peers and community members guess what they were comparing on their graphs. Can you guess?

Tangram Fractions

Grade 3-5, Math

For this math lesson, I broke my students into small groups and allowed them time to play with tangrams to explore how the shapes fit together. Once they had about 5 minutes to play, I asked them some guiding questions to begin discovering fractions.

  • How many times does the small triangle fit into the larger triangle? 
  • How many times does it fit into the small square? 
  • If the small triangle fits into the small square 2 times, what fraction of a small square is a small triangle?

Of course these questions were basic for my 4th grade students, but I wanted them to determine that although all the shapes are different sizes, each shape can be measured using the smallest triangle. 

Next, I let my students play again! I gave my students 5 more minutes to play with the pieces but told them that by the end of the 5 minutes they must have some sort of picture created with the blocks. This picture should not have more than 10 pieces, and should include at least 3 different colors of pieces. I showed them this picture of a house as a simple picture I made using my requirements. 

Once each group of students agreed on a picture, I first went around and took a picture of each one. This is mostly because I didn’t want someone to bump the table and the kids to not remember what color piece went where. With the images documented, I had my students pull out their math notebooks to answer the following question: What fraction of your total picture is each color?

Answering was a challenge for many of my students. Even with the guiding questions at the beginning, I had students tell me that in the picture on the right blue is 3/10th of the total because 3 pieces were blue out of 10 total. But with some patience and some partner work, most of my students came to quickly understand this misconception and determine a strategy to accurately answer this journal prompt!

Area and Perimeter of Compound Shapes

Grade 3-5, Math

As an introduction to compound shapes I arranged pieces of artwork my students had completed into three different shapes on the board: an L, a snake, and a straight line. The artwork came directly from our unit on imagination, where students drew pictures to fill a nine frame square.The kids loved using their art as the base of math, connecting to the problem because their pieces were being used on the board. 

First, I asked my students: Does each compound shape have the same area? Answers varied and as a class we calculated that each shape does indeed have the same area.

Next, I asked my students: does each compound shape have the same perimeter? Again, answered varied and we calculated as a class that each shape had the same perimeter as well.

For our independent challenge I had students work out an answer to the following question:

Is there a way I can arrange these boxes to have the same area but a different perimeter? 

Students loved this challenge as it provided them with an opportunity to disprove the belief that shapes with the same area must have the same perimeter. They ultimately discovered that if they moved these four nine-frame boxes into a square that the area remained 36 square units, but the perimeter switched from being 30 units to being only 24 units around. 

Whiteboard Angles

Grade 3-5, Math

This was a fun center idea for students to determine Obtuse, Acute, and Right Angles. The kids taped up some old tables outside in the common space to create intersections of different sized angles. Next, in small groups the class took turns labeling each angle with it’s corresponding name based on it’s size.

Labeling Tables

A few days later, once we introduced angle degrees and measurement using protractors, the kids were again able to use these tables in small groups, this time to measure how big each angle was. The tape provided an extra challenge, as the kids figured out they needed to measure from the inner tape line

Math Talks

Grade 3-5, Grade K-2, Math

I believe Math Talks are one of the best methods to both challenge advanced students and support struggling students. In a math talk, students are given a problem, or question, to which there may be one or multiple answers, but there are many strategies of which this answer(s) could be found.

Steps to a Successful Math Talk

  1. Have students work individually on the problem or question introduced– I tell my students, if you have figured out one way to solve the problem, do another. Find as many strategies or solutions as you can.
  2. Walk around and jot down what methods students are using– I keep a running list of strategies that both work and do not work with names next to them so I have a plan for who to invite up to share their work.
  3. Come back together as a class to share– I call on the students who’s names I wrote down and tell them which strategy I would like them to talk about.
  4. Students teach each other– I used to write down the answers for my kids and have them talk through their thinking as I write, but I’ve found that once my class feels comfortable with each other, the students can write and explain their own strategies while using their presenting skills.
  5. Allow the class to ask follow-up questions once a student shares– I also ask clarifying questions, especially if the student arrived at an incorrect solution so that as a class we can discuss the misconception. At the end of each share, I ask the class, who else used this strategy? This is important as it allows students who were not asked to share to be recognized for their work.

We use Math Talks quite frequently in my 4th grade classrooms. I found the Math Talk from which these pictures are taken to be a great pre-assessment for my students in terms of addition. Most of my students were able to use the standard algorithm for addition to solve the question 39+84=. Many of my students chose to use some type of visual representation for the problem, either a number line, or an organizer with breaking apart the numbers. One of my advanced students was even able to recognize that 39 and 84 are both divisible by 13 and solved this problem by first dividing each by 13 then multiplying 13 by the total he divided by.

M&M Estimation

Grade 3-5, Math
Inquiring about how to use the scale

Who doesn’t like mixing food with learning? Today we investigated how many M&M’s we thought were in one bag using a scale to weigh in grams. As a whole class, we inquired into how the scale works, playing with it’s functions. Next, I drew popsicle sticks to determine groups of four students to work together to reach a conclusion of how many candies there were. The group got to pick either a crispy bag of m&m’s or a regular bag of m&ms to experiment with. The rules were simple: use any strategy you want to figure out how many m&m’s are in the bag. Yes, you can open the bag and use the m&m’s but no, you cannot count the m&m’s one by one, you must somehow use the scale.

Hint: Look at the back to figure out what the total weight of the package is.

Working in small groups to organize our thinking
Weighing the M&M’s in small amounts

The results for this lesson were varied. Many students got frustrated since when they weighed only one m&m the scale weighed 0kg but when they weighed two m&m’s it sometimes weighed 2kg. Regardless, the students had fun, used teamwork, developed skills on how to use a scale, and were creative in their approaches to get reasonable results whether or not they were totally accurate.

Pizza Three-Act-Task

Grade 3-5, Math
Pizza Shop Menu

During a weekend trip to Seoul, I went to a pizza shop in Itaewon selling a wide variety of types of pizza. My friend and I debated over whether we would pizza multiple slices or a whole pizza, and ultimately decided that we would go for slices to try more kinds. Good thing we did since each slice was huge, and 3 slices made up half a pizza! This got me thinking . . . mathematically, this wouldn’t make sense for the pizza shop to even sell whole pizzas at all! This is how I got my idea for a lesson I taught the next day at school.

Act I: What do you notice in this picture? What do you wonder about what you are looking at?

Students discussed that this must be a pizza shop and how the numbers represented the prices. They determined that triangles must mean prices for single slices and circles must mean prices for full pizzas.

Act 2: How many slices do you think the pizza shop should sell in their whole pizzas?

We discussed what they remembered from a previous unit on businesses and how businesses normally price items in order to make a profit.

Act 3: This pizza shop sells 6 slices per pizza. How does this compare to your answer? Do you think the pizza shop should change the number of slices per pizza? Why or why not?

Testing for Control Variables in a Fair Test

Grade 3-5, How the World Works, Science
Student Workpage

Central Idea: Experimenting and investigating lead us to uncover how the natural world works.

Line of Inquiry: Defining the factors that determine a fair test

What? Students participate in “unfair” tests with a small group in order to determine what makes a test accurate.

How? After a whole class example of how to perform the first activity on the sheet to the left, each group followed the procedure to complete all three activities. For the first activity, a soccer ball and a kick ball were dropped from different heights and the bounce height was to be recorded. My students were able to determine that the data they gathered from each test was not valid. Additionally they identified what conditions need to be controlled (controlled variable) in order for the results to be accurate.

Why? Scientists do everything in their power to obtain accurate results when conducting experiments in order for their discoveries to be valid. Understanding what makes a test unfair will help my students set up experiments and activities that give proper results.

Student answers that demonstrate knowledge of a fair test and that there can be multiple controlled variables.
Ball Drop Test from different heights