Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Math 101

Today is a complete SUCCESS for my math lesson- it's not that I taught the greatest lesson or was at the top of my game- the success goes to my STUDENTS!!! I wish that someone could have been in my room with me today to hear the group discussion and also a small group discussion I had as  I was challenging 3 students. Well, nobody was in here so I'm "bragging" about my students today!
In large group we did a 5 minute activity that turned into 20 because of GREAT Thinking!! We were looking at groups and making one or two less. The problem that turned into a great discussion was we had 6 dots. What number of dots would we have if we had one less? I let students think about it and the discussion just went on and on. When I asked students how they knew there would be 5 dots left the students told me because there will be a group of 2 and a group of 3 and that makes 5. Other students told me that there is a group of 2 another group of 2 and one left so that makes 5. I have attached a picture to this blog to show you the reasoning students knew there would be 5.

Later during the math lesson I was challenging a group of 3 students. We had to represent a number and then build/change that number. Each student had 3 ten frames. We had a discussion about counting by 10s and how many squares were in front of students. Students started with having to represent the number 20. They had to build off 20 to make 25. Students did that quickly and I thought hmm that's too easy. So I had students clear their ten frames. I then flipped over 23. One student said, "Mrs. Earle I could have kept 25 and turned it into 27 easier." My heart stopped at this moment and I held back the tears of pride and smiled and gave him a high five. As we continued, they had to change 23 to 17. The same student said, "I know two full cards is 20 and that's too many." He quickly pulled off 3 more cards and was done. This was the first day I challenged students with this instruction of this math activity-
I can't be happier or more proud of all 3 students for going the extra mile in math today.

This goes to show that students will do what we ask and what we expect- yes, they may be 5/6 but they CAN and WILL do what we push them to do!