Yesterday was an interesting day. Not only am I continuing to deal with the time constraint issue in my afternoon class, but two fire alarms before the end of first period meant that three of my classes are a bit behind. I'm going to be doing a bit of triage today to remain at the pace I want. If we start with this schedule next year, I am not going to try to fit my norm setting unit into 4 days. I'll just go ahead and spread it out to 9 because I'm rushing. I fear there will be an effect later, so I am going to have to make a conscious effort to revisit these expectations frequently throughout the first month or so.
I did introduce them to our class mascot Nemo and his Instagram page. I had quite a few follow requests waiting for me when I got home that evening. Here is my 5th Period waving hello to Nemo...
The conversations with my classes today were excellent. I really wanted to work on some basic routines like standing to share your thinking, and the expectations for the listeners while sharing. I also wanted to make it very clear that math is a creative endeavor and that we are not always seeing the same things in our mental constructs so sharing how we are seeing things has great value. To that end, our activities today centered primarily around a Dot Card Talk and Which One Doesn't Belong.
Dot Card Talk
I used a pattern similar to the one Jo Boaler uses in her video clip rather than the one linked in the Week of Inspiration Materials. Here you can see some of the descriptions that my fifth block was giving.
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| We talked a lot about the benefit of clustering and patterns over counting. |
I noticed based on the responses in this class relative to my morning groups that I must've moved a bit more quickly past the dot screen. I had far more frequent offerings that represented inaccurate "counts." I used it as an opportunity to focus not on the accuracy of the numbers but on the strategies of the clustering, acknowledging that the time was likely too quick for accurate responses but that it was the patterns that we are exploring that mattered most in this task. I talked about how important it was for students to share their way of seeing math and not to assume that the others in their group are seeing it the same way.
I recognize that my sentences here are using "I" as the subject often and it isn't lost on me that I need to start shifting more of that. Rushing through this norm week is causing me to take shortcuts that I'm not thrilled about. The learners did take turns sharing out their description of what they had seen. Other learners were encouraged to keep their hands down and focus their attention entirely on the speaker during these share out moments. This was a norm that I tried to emphasize heavily in the lesson.
Which One Doesn't Belong?
After our Dot Talk, we moved directly into a WODB task focusing on shapes. We had talked about how we all see things slightly differently so this was a great segway. For the first picture (shapes), students moved to different corners of the room to represent which one they thought didn't belong. It was great to see one of my students plant himself smack dab in the middle of the room. He struggled to articulate what he was arguing but he had already noticed that an argument could be made for each of them. Did I mention that this was one of my students identified with learning difficulties? So, yeah.
For the second image, they had already recognized that an argument could be made for each of the responses so we focused on forming viable arguments and I pushed back a bit on the imprecision of some of the language. I was trying to front load them for the notes on the Math Habits of Mind that was to follow.
You can see that one student here (whose name I neglected to record) focused on the actual shapes of the symbols rather than the value of the numbers. That, and the few students who recognized the sum of the digits was 7 for four of the figures had the learners ooo'ing and ahh'ing a bit. Good times!
I made a few phone calls home to praise some students for their contributions. Thankful Thursday!
Interactive Notebook Foldable
From these activities (for at least two of the classes), we moved into our Interactive Notebook. We focused on the next three habits of mind, adding each of them into our foldable. Unfortunately, two of my classes were behind and we will have to try to catchup today. We recorded the Math Habit (what our state calls the SMPs) and a small little picture or graphic to remind us of what they mean. I need to work on my images a bit, but the students are already picking up my sense of humor and sarcasm about my "amazing" art skills so that was a bit fun. I'm going to like this group.
Homeroom Revisited
Our Support for Personalized Learning Classes don't start until next week so we are still ending our day with our homerooms. I have been focusing on a lot of team building and culture setting activities with them. They completed the third column of Kristen Fouss' version of Name Tags and then we worked on the Survival in the Desert task I found from Sarah Carter's blog.
I really liked this activity and the types of conversations I was hearing at the groups. I would make some changes to the format of the ranking sheet because it was a bit confusing for them. We stopped the class with about five minutes to go for a brief whole class debate on what was the most important item to take. We were unable to reach consensus before the bell rang, but it was a great opportunity to revisit the norms for sharing ideas that we had established in their individual classes throughout the day.
On Day Four, I was hoping to get them working on the large whiteboards and use an Estimation180 task to talk about precision (units) and modeling (number lines) but I may try to knock out that foldable first. Friday is always such a catch-up day.
I am ready for a weekend for sure! I hope everyone else is having a great start to the year.
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