Math is such a balancing act isn’t it? We need to run a math talk, we need to play games, we need to do consolidation, we need big problem questions, we need time to discuss as a class. The list seems to go on forever. However, it doesn’t have to be like that.
I always start with bellringers. These form my math talks every day. You will notice I’m not saying number talk. If you’ve taken math qualifications or been part of a PA day you know there is a difference and we aren’t going to debate them. What I do is a math talk. So we discuss the question and the strategies they use to complete it. If the question involves strictly numbers like addition, multiplication, or an operation then we do a true number talk and we name strategies. This takes us roughly ten or fifteen minutes. But the best part of this number talk is that my students know exactly what to do when they walk in the door. They walk in, they pick up the paper from my desk if its the beginning of the week, and they get started right away. This gives me time to welcome everyone and collect money if it needs to be collected, or deal with any issues that arise. And let’s be honest there is always something that comes up, even if it’s just your teaching partner wanting to chat. Here is a picture of my bellringers and you can see the two different colours. There is a reason for this. I photocopy my bellringers in the summer so I don’t have to do it during the school year. I do ten weeks at a time. However, when I have a split grade I always want to differentiate the colours so I don’t get mixed up. So this is my way of ensuring I don’t give the wrong grade on the wrong sheet. (file folder)
Then we move into the problem-solving portion of the day. You see, I run a flipped math classroom. This means that instead of assigning homework, students are given a video to watch on a math topic. They are to make notes in their interactive math notebooks and then when they come to class they are ready to learn. I’m sure you can see the downside to this, that students require internet access at home. But let me put out there that 1. I’ve worked at the roughest schools where kids didn’t have access at home, and they still were able to do the math this way and 2. You would be surprised how many kids do have access at home.
To enable kids who might not have access I always offer the first five or ten minutes before school actually starts for them to come in and watch their videos.
Moving back to problem-solving. Often we have practice questions to do and I write those on the Smartboard for students to know where to find them, and which ones to do. This enables me to circulate, but also to pull students into small groups to see how they are doing and also see if I can help them improve their methods. I also pull students based on how I saw them do the previous day. For example, if they were struggling with order of operations steps yesterday I would pull several students that were struggling with the same concepts and work through several problems in that small group. This takes about 40 minutes
After I feel like students have either finished their questions, or have spent enough time problem solving we come together as a class to discuss how they did. Were they able to use any strategies from the math talk? What did they find easy? What worked well? What didn’t work? We might even work through a sample problem together. This is the consolidation piece of my class and I will be honest that it looks different over different days. Some days we might do a gallery walk to view patterns. Some days we might just discuss strategies. Whatever we do this helps them to review and make their learning more real. This takes us about ten minutes.
It’s not difficult to set up an easy to run math program. It’s just going to take some work ahead of time!
Apologies for this video – it isn’t perfect as Facebook was really struggling I will upload a much better one tonight!
Thank you to those who came to my live video sessions I truly appreciate it! The download below is my way of saying thanks!