Second day of School

        So the second day of school was when all the fun started. It was going to be the first time that I would be actually teaching my kids something useful in math. However my first lesson was a hard concept. Since my kids took the math assessment yesterday, I had some idea how much they knew and what we needed to work on. When I saw the scores for the lessons I was going to be teaching in the first week, my heart feel a bit. Everyone but 2 people got the first question wrong. The question read: 16 + 7 = ____ + 15.  The correct answer is 8 but many of my students put 23 as their answer. After much thinking and thought, I realized their mistake: they were adding 16 + 7 and not looking at the other side.

       I needed to do something so that my kids can understand this important concept. So on my second day of school, I was trying to figure out what to do. The main problem as that I was not prepared for this lesson. As I have mentioned, the lesson that I was giving was not mine since I just found out on Friday that I was teaching 4^th grade. Some of the things that the person I took lessons from suggested, I was not sure I was able to execute well. So I had a plan but I decided to improvise a bit from it so that It could match my style.