First Problem of the Month - PART THREE

So we started this POM with the Primary Version on Thursday, and continued with introducing Level A on Friday. We did our first work session on that same day, but I'm writing about it separately because, in my mind, it was a whole other animal. For those directed explorations and that introduction, I was very much at the center of those activities. (Evidenced by the number of times I say "I" in the last post *ahem*)  I'm not saying I don't engage my students, because I do, with questions and protocols and prompts for getting them talking and thinking. But it's just not the same as saying, hey, here's this situation....what would you do with it? The noise level (theirs) and aggravation level (mine) are proof that these are not the same lessons.

We read the problem together and I dismissed them to grab their math bags and a tray.  "You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit" when it comes to the trays people, let's keep moving. Roughly half the class got back to their desks and immediately started in with "What are we doing? I don't know what to do." Sigh.

I started to coach in with a kid or two, asking them what's happening in the story, can you make her acorns, but I gently reminded myself that that's not my job and instead, I ignored the escalating noise (save the occasional warning that "We do not swing our math bags!" Safety first, people, safety first) of the frustrated masses and started trying to focus in on the students who were making sense (there were a few!) and what their strategies seemed to be.

After about five minutes (which felt like 4 months), I called for a "mid workshop interruption" and told them we would be putting our hands behind our backs because you're not allowed to touch anybody's work, and we would be walking quietly to look at other people's work to see if we could find any ideas that might help us get started back at our own trays.

Here is a picture of that. There are 20 boys in this class of 32.  Can we get a moment of silence for their teacher, please. (But don't feel TOO badly for her...she is charmed.)  In the interest of full disclosure, I had to put one child on a time out right after this for destroying a child's work, just until I could get over there and have a little heart-to-heart about what "we don't touch anybody else's work" actually means. I also had another student who decided to loudly announce, as he stood over each tray, either "LOVE IT" or "HATE IT". Which started a chorus of this in the class and required me to call for a moratorium on all proclamations.... just look people, and zip it for now. That's some solid teaching, right there.

But even with these nuisances, it was well worth it when we got settled back into our desks and we reached my magic number of around 75% of my students working hard on whatever their idea was.

Here is a thirty second video of me verifying that this Little One can articulate his first step.  We stand up and within seconds we are at a desk where his services are sorely needed. After he gets her started in counting her 17 acorns, I pull him to work with my other friend here on the carpet.

Both students started by making 17 acorns, but Andrew (on top) interpreted giving "each one" an acorn as giving away one acorn, whereas Junior, below, is correctly interpreting the problem. I love this kind of "match making" and use it on the daily. My only prompt was, "You two come down to the carpet, I want you to listen to each other, and see if you can understand how the other person solved the problem."

This is another student who used Andrew's idea (they were working together) but he is using his tools differently. This is so common, I see it every year, where students use these base-ten sticks as tallies or some other kind of unit.

I have no idea what they were talking about, but I love the spontaneous crowd that gathered around as she walked them through her thinking.

I like how a large number of students used these sort of "grouping" strategies to keep track of the different "parts" of the problem, being the 8 acorns Cevanna gave away first, the 5 she gave away next, and the four remaining in the little stack in the corner.

I also love little Rodrigo's use of color coding.  The red ones are the 8 squirrels and the yellow ones are the 5 squirrels, and the cubes are the acorns he's passing out.  Nice matching of the cube-to-counter also. And clearly, his way makes a lot of sense to Princess, next to him, who is co-opting it as her own. He was really good at explaining himself here, too. {LOVE}

It was bumpy, I'm not going to lie about that. But in the end, I was really pleased with their overall progress and attitudes. I know we will do this exact same prompt on Tuesday, when we get back to school after the three-day weekend (bless) so I wasn't worried in the least about who got what answers. My biggest concerns were around the culture I wanted to build in math class. By far, this class was the most aggressively negative in the way they generally dealt with each other (mathematically speaking) and it made me sad. But no way was I letting them see that! So I passed on a lecture and closed by making this quick poster:

I posed it as simply, "this is how mathematicians talk" and we found some words to replace the negative ones I'd been hearing during the workshop. My favorite is "Who wants to talk about the problem?" instead of "I'm done" because nothing goes straight up a teacher's back more quickly than a kid who yells that they're done 90 seconds into a carefully crafted lesson. Really now. Oh, and as for that final one... They made the cutest connection to this book which our Instructional Coach had come in and read to them the day before. When we replaced "I don't know what to do" with "Can somebody help me get started" they said it was just like the story, you just needed an idea that you could feed and grow. {LOVE}

I think I'll close by reminding myself that going slow helps you go fast. And then I'm going to remind myself that, really, they were pretty amazing. Then I'm going to take a nap.