Monday, January 6, 2014

Singapore Math and Flipped Learning

Theresa and Stacye approached me and asked how I felt about flipped learning.  I love the idea in principle but wasn't sure about how it would work with second graders.  Especially since they're also adopting Math in Focus this year.  It seems like a lot to tackle all at once.  But if they were game, so was I, and I agreed to help them on their journey.  Now, we're four months into the experiment and things seem to be going really well.  I've talked to parents, other teachers, the principal and everyone is enthusiastic.  I've even heard from other schools that they're using the videos in class for their students and to train teachers.

What really blew me away was when I went to do some model drawing in another second grade class, who are also part of the journey.  We'd drawn a model and were ready to subtract 179 from 603.  Buck raised his hand and asked if they should use compensation subtraction, open number line, or traditional algorithm.  Whoa!  Turns out an unexpected side benefit is children learn more vocabulary from watching the videos repeated times.  I asked Buck which method made more sense to him.  He said, "I like traditional, but compensation makes more sense because there's a zero."

Theresa and Stacye will be presenting a session on Flipped Learning at our National Conference on Singapore Math this summer.  Registration is now open.  http://sde.com/singapore-math2014/  I can't wait to see what they have to say.

2 comments:

James Abram said...

Mixing Singapore Math with other teaching methods like using videos will be a great help for kids learning.

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