One of the missions of this blog is to take the work of the amazing online community of math teachers known as the MathTwitterBlogoSphere (MTBoS) and to show what modifications are made for students with disabilities. I call it the #MTBoS Mod(ification). You can read the first two editions here and here. This edition is about the lesson structure created by Dan Meyer known as a 3-Act Task.
#MTBoS MOD: 3-Act Edition
The 3-Act math task I chose was created by Graham Fletcher called It All Adds Up. I chose this because in our spring trimester we focus solely on financial literacy. As a teacher of students with disabilities we spend a great deal of time on the adaptive mathematics that is often over-looked or just simply considered a “real world context” in the classes of typically developing students. In the world of special education these tasks are known as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs), which are complex skills needed to live independently. IADLs are not to be confused with the Activities of Daily Living, which are basic self-care tasks. At my school we call these skills the Mathematics for the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living.
As a pre-assessment for our “money unit” (as the students call it) I used “It All Adds Up.” The goal was to see how comfortable the students were with identifying coins and counting different combinations of coin denominations. I launched the task with three of my student groups. The task is great for students at different computation levels. At the simplest level the students can solve it by adding coins together to equal $1.00. At a more complex level students can look for patterns that can help them solve the problem more efficiently as well as reflect on the possibility of multiple solutions to the problem. I gave this task to groups of students with a variety of different needs and modes of processing. I’ve broken the three groups into the three stages of the Concrete-Representational-Abstract method of instruction.
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