An Inquiry Into Our Weekly Schedule

For our math this year, we wanted to be very intentional about what outcomes we could integrate authentically and easily into our Units of Inquiry. Our first unit is How We Organize Ourselves with a focus on decision making and solving problems as a community.

We dabbled last year with schedules, time, elapsed time, clock reading, etc. so we wanted to continue integrating those ideas into our math for this unit. This actually works out great for a first unit because students can get really familiar with our weekly schedule.

Part of my pre-assessment was seeing how they do with elapsed time. I asked a simple question:

Mr. John wanted to organize his apartment.

Mr. John cleaned the bathroom for 12 minutes.

He folded laundry for 7 minutes.

The kitchen took 13 minutes to clean.

How long total did he organize?

This was done on whiteboards on the carpet so I could see what strategies they use to calculate their answer. Most students were able to do this easily.

I added the next step which ventures into what happens when the minutes exceeds 59?

The principal wanted his teachers to complete some homework!

The first part took 43 minutes to complete.

The second part took 22 minutes to complete.

The last part took 19 minutes to complete.

How long did it take the teachers to finish the homework?

This was interesting to see how they all added up to 84 minutes, but only a few wrote 84 minutes AND 1 hour and 24 minutes. I prompted the students by saying “I see a few students wrote two DIFFERENT answers but they are BOTH correct. They look different.” Some were confused but I didn’t want to give it away.

A few more caught on, before I gave a bigger hint of: ____ hours ____ minutes and a lot more wrote it down. Some were still a bit shell-shocked—either back to school adjustments or a confusion with time in general.

We moved on to exploring our schedule and I made a note to check in with those students during independent work time.

What do you see? Think? wonder? about our schedule below:

My weekly schedule outline for this school year.

Part of this inquiry was noticing what was the same or different to last year, what we see, what colors we see (I added them), and what they generally think. The students are pretty used to schedules by fourth grade so they are kind of like okay, sure, whatever.

The next step was getting them to think of some questions they wonder about the schedule. They didn’t have a ton of deeper questions related to math, so luckily I had some back up questions. We started with a whole class dive into one specific question to see what they think:

On Mondays, how much time do we spend in the homeroom?

What do we need to know to figure this out?

We had a brainstorm about what we need to know based on how the data is organized. We talked about how many periods we are in homeroom and how long each one is. Surprisingly, a big handful got it pretty quickly. We talked about strategies and how there are 6 periods of 40 minutes each which is 240 minutes which happens to divide evenly by 6 into 4 hours. (This would be a good time to show 6x40=4x60 aka 6x4x10=4x6x10, but I used this associative property for the second question we did a deeper dive into, even though I should’ve used it then!)

I went through what students were thinking with those strategies and I said let’s try number 2 on our own.

I also mentioned that Wednesday period 7 is 10 minutes shorter! I gave them the following print out to reference and had some extra follow up questions they could look at.

This one problem turned into almost 3 more math lessons of students working on it. It took a lot of individual meetings and small group nudges. Also a few whole class breaks and clarifications for understanding. But in the end most students got an approximation to the correct answer with different strategies. I’ll add the photos below.

The next step would be then to either continue some other problems or move on to questions about: why does the school have 5 Chinese periods and only one swimming? Why did they decide to put 2 art periods together? and get the students to think about the rationale behind these decisions and what the impacts of these decisions are.

Whole group discussion flipchart that I added to little by little.

The second part of the chart I didn’t get a shot of (I need to be better at consolidating on one chart if possible! or keep both side by side…) is the strategies that they used to get their 17 hours and 10 minutes.

Some did division 1030 divided by 60 (challenging) some did repeated subtraction of 60 (one student did 180 minutes in chunks of 3 hours) or one group added up the periods 40+40… until they got the 17 hours and 50 minutes (so close!)

This was a good way to show all the different strategies we can use that got us to the same answer!

One student even wrote on his notebook: Idea from (student’s name), but my work! meaning he got the strategy from the other student but did it himself. I love when they teach each other! They do it better than me.

Some student work on mini-whiteboards, the big whiteboard, their tables (whiteboard tables) and their notebooks!