Making a Difference

Friday, Jun 30, 2006

A HISTORICAL DATE USING HAN-5
JUNE 30, 2006

Today was the first day in educational history that everyone of 436 students
Grades 1st through 6 th
gathered together and in unison counted by
MULTIPLES OF FOUR UP TO 120
MULTIPLES OF SIX UP TO 108
MULTIPLES OF EIGHT UP TO 128

Then one of the fifth grade teachers came up to the auditorium and radomly called up four students to play high equivalency of 1/8 and in 32 seconds the highest fraction given was 12/96.Wow!

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF TEACHERS, STUDENTS, PARENTS, and ADMINSTRATORS for believing that every child can learn if given the right tool and rule! 

STATISTICS for implementing this program will be provided through KERN COUNTY MIGRANT OFFICE  and place on our web site in August ! 

Special thanks to Dr. Ryder, Phil, and Betty for having open minds and believing that we can pull every child up towards the Proficient and Advance levels in Mathematics

Making a difference Creating curriculum that addresses all learning styles and providing encouragement, patience, and love are the four seeds needed for the type of students I teach every day. For the last two years, I have taught in a Dual Language Program involving the same thirty-eight students in Kindergarten and First grade. Last year, with student’s Fall assessments, 68% of my Kindergarteners were classified as L1 English Language Learners, 98% did not know any of their letters and sounds, and 99 % could not count or write their numbers up to 20.

The math curriculum, adopted by my district, seemed to only focus on visual learner, so I decided to use a math program, called Han-5, that I supplemental approved through the State of California to benefit my kinesthetic and auditory learners, as well as my visual learners. After teaching my students how to count by ones and tens, I taught them one of the lessons from the Han-5 Program: learning the sequential number pattern for multiples of four. In ten minutes, I had the entire class counting by fours up to one hundred. In another five minutes, I had each student adding multiples of four and multiplying by them. It didn’t matter if they were English learners, low, or high achievers. Students were entertained while listening to stories about frogs and placing number puppets on their Han-5 Boogie Boards as they added tens to ones. From that point on, seeds started to sprout and grow with excitement and motivation to learn more.

Over the last five years, it has been interesting to watch my students find different patterns in other parts of the curriculum too. For example, word families (adding different initial consonants to a same base word to make new words), recognizing repeating words in sentences, and classifying words phonically (into CVC and CVCE words). By opening a door through mathematics and showing my students how to recognize and identify different numbered sequential patterns, it also helped them become successful with their spelling, reading, and writing achievement.

This year, in first grade, 95% of the same 38 students I taught last year tested at the Advanced level of our mid-year Math benchmark. 98% of them make 100’s on their weekly spelling tests. 77% are reading on second grade level and 23% on first grade level. Some of these students include: Mark, Jorge, Gizel, and Jonathan, who have been identified as having attention deficit disorders, Alex, Victor, Adriana, Selez, and Magdalana, who have been identified as special needs students, and nineteen L1 English speakers who have moved up in one year to L 2 and L3 in their English Language proficiency. I owe these amazing results to the Han-5 math system, because students found it fun and easy to learn math concepts repeatedly experienced through concrete, visual, and pictorial forms at a synthesis and analysis level of learning, instead of just memorizing math facts.

The Han-5 system simply involves students recognizing ten as both a single entity ten (1 ten) and ten units (10 ones). Then by using one hand as a visual representation for data, students learn how to add sequential tens (10, 20, 30, 40, etc.) to ones, repetitively. It is exciting to see students learn math functions, place value, and analyze how repeating and growing number patterns develop. Then take that foundation and watch them count by multiples, add multiples, recall multiplication and division facts, solve algebraic problems, parts to whole, square roots, ratios, reduce fractions, write equivalent fractions, and solve many other kinds of algorithms.

Through pre and post test and CAT/6 results, the Han-5 Program has successfully proven to assist every kind of learner acquire math skills needed for elementary and middle school. It has been rewarding to create a math program that empowers children to achieve.