Students in room 5 have been working hard at learning to be successful work partners during math time! Below are more photos of kids in our class practicing partner work while playing a math game yesterday.
Today our class began our big September counting project. I did this project with my class last year and it was a lot of fun and made for some wonderful hands-on learning through discovery. Part of why I love it so much is that I get to talk students through their thinking as they problem solve with partners, then watch and support their powerful "ah-ha!" moments as we move through our discovery! Today we began by my asking the students questions like, "why do we count," and "what are some things we could count?" Students then began working with partners to count different things in our classroom (books in a basket, a bucket full of pattern blocks, a bin of crayons, etc) and to record their counting on a clipboard. Today, as the first day in the project, I did not tell the students how to count or how to record their work but rather watched students work and asked them questions to guide their thinking. As they worked together I would ask questions such as, "how are you choosing to count these things," "how are you keeping track of your counting," "what could you do if you lost count," "how could you check your answer," "how are you recording what you counted?" The way that students are able to try a counting strategy they generate, answer my questions to explain their thinking, realize where they are getting stuck, then devise a way to modify their counting/recording strategy makes for wonderful discovery of effective ways to count a set of objects and to reason through a problem. In the following days students will have more opportunities to count collections of objects, refine counting strategies, learn from what other students are trying, and find effective ways to count, record, and keep track of their counting. Our final project will be problem solving "the best way" to count our entire class collection of unifix cubes (we have over 1,000!). Last year my students loved doing this project! I will post more along the way and you may also look at last year's project in my archived posts from last September. Below are photos of our first day working on the project.
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