Don't Be So Helpful!

I had the joy of spending a day learning from Dr. Yeap Ban Har, from Singapore, again last week.  I've seen him many times and always learn something new.  This time he talked about the importance of social learning for our students--how they can learn from each other with less help from us.

I use these strips for lots of activities, including vocabulary, divisibility rules, rounding and estimating, ordering, etc.  But this was a task for teachers.

  

Students have built the number 3,246. 

 You've asked them to find the number that is 300 less than this number, but they're struggling.  What questions can you ask the group to help move them?  And can you sequence your questions from the least helpful to the most helpful?  We tend to jump in and tell students what to do and rescue them.  As we work to build more perseverance, we need to be a lot less helpful.

These are the questions a group in TX came up with.  How would you sequence them from least helpful to most helpful?  What other questions would you add?  It's interesting to take the time to think through our questions.  To help our students more, we need to be a lot less helpful!

I've been working with place value strips for a long time. ( I'm very excited about Crystal Spring Book's new student-sized strips.  They come in sets of 10 or 30.  http://www.crystalspringsbooks.com/student-size-4-digit-place-value-strips-small-group-set.html .)

Primary Workstations

I just returned from North Carolina, where we explored number sense through workstations.  There were kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers.
If I'm going to make a workstation, I want to make sure there are options built in (for me and the children) and differentiation in included in the workstation.

                                                       Shape Puzzles

 I used the school die cut machine to cut out shapes and assigned a value.to each.  The kinder and first grade teachers worked with numbers within 10.  

 The second grade standard was working on adding by 10s to 120.  Some teachers went higher!

Changing the task to "Make a picture with a value of 100" really changed it.  It was way more difficult to reach the sum AND be creative.
If I were doing this with children, I would have used more (and better) colors.  We grabbed what was close by.  I think it shows the idea well.  The children also would label the picture, using the names of the shapes and their values.  FUN!!