At my school, all of the classrooms are outfitted with a wall-mounted, computer-connected overhead projector. I've found so many ways to use this technology to enhance my lessons that I think if I didn't have a district-provided projector, I'd buy one (like the kind that can sit on a cart). Managing Routines Using a combination of the projector and Google Slides, I'm able to manage some of our complicated routines with minimal effort. During math I project a slideshow that starts with a funky math song (there are so many of these on YouTube! We particularly love Jack Hartman's exercise videos), followed by the content of my mini lesson (more on that below), followed by an opportunity to choose a math goal for the day. During the work time in the workshop I project slides showing where each person should be during each of our math rotations, including a digital countdown that tells us when to switch. The countdowns are also YouTube videos, which you can easily embed directly into a Google Slide. It turns out that YouTube has countdown videos for basically any denomination of time; I particularly favor ones that show a slowly eroding pie chart indicating how much time is left. At the end of our math period, we consider two reflection slides that mirror the goal setting slide and ask us what we did well and what we need to improve in the future. Some days I have students share their reflections with a partner, and on others I call on individuals to share with the group. Using slides, rather than charts, for tracking some routines also facilitates flexibility in those routines. I've been struggling recently with differentiating my writing instruction to serve the needs of all of my writers, the majority of whom churn out several sentences and a few heavily-labeled pictures at every writing session, but some of whom still struggle to choose every letter. One solution I've tried is teaching one mini-lesson to the majority while a small group (who also struggle with sustained attention) spends some extra time at reading centers. When I dismiss the large group to work independently, I call the small group to the rug for a more heavily supervised guided practice session. Slides telling everyone where they should be make trying out this routine--and switching up who goes where and works with whom--much easier. ![]() Slides also help us make time for fun! At one point in the year I realized that I wasn't actually reading an entire picture book every day. Sure, I'd read an excerpt to demonstrate a teaching point, but often I was stretching one book out for three or four days. I worried that a read aloud for pleasure would take up too much time (I was wrong and it's an extremely valuable use of time), especially since some students really struggle with whole-body listening during read aloud. Slides to the rescue! I added a slide that displayed a twelve minute countdown for reading aloud (including a trusty eroding pie chart)and explained to my students that I really wanted us to be able to share a book for fun each day, but that we had limited time to do so--and that when the timer was up reading time was done. Students began encouraging one another to get to the rug and to focus, because they understood their responsibility in determining whether we got to the end of the book that day. Enhancing Guided Practice Projecting slides also allows for more interaction. During our math mini lesson, I use the slides to provide the base for the math work we are doing--such as an empty number bond, or a photo that they need to model with math, or an empty equation with spaces for numbers and a circle to fill in with the appropriate operation. Then, because I'm projecting on a magnetic whiteboard, students are able to show their work with dry erase markers and/or magnets. P.S. I Still Love You, Too, PostIt!
A cursory look at my classroom Instagram account ( @bilingualexplorers, viewable on the right side of the blog homepage!) shows that my class spends a ton of time constructing, revising, and referencing physical paper charts. I'm not ready to co-construct slides with my students yet (though that is definitely on the horizon), so they aren't providing the same shared writing experience as paper charts. Plus, I only project the slides I think we need to reference at any given time. Paper charts hang all day, every day, for weeks or, in some cases, months. Students access them whenever they realize they are relevant, at times and in ways that I would never devise.
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Over the summer I wrote (here and here) about my efforts to shift my math instruction from whole-group dominated to a more small-group oriented structure. As the first quarter draws to a close, I am feeling very good about this decision. Students are more active and more engaged for more of the math block than my group was last year. Preliminary assessment data also has me optimistic that this method is going to produce significant gains for my group of learners. Advantages to Guided Math As I anticipated over the summer, moving to guided math has made it much easier to differentiate my math instruction. It also increases the ease of incorporating concrete representations into my students' guided practice, which responds to their developmental needs. Working in a small group with every student, every day has also created a formative assessment feedback-loop that I didn't know would exist, and that is really improving my instruction. Here's an example from last week that incorporates all three: It was our first lesson explicitly about addition. I would say and write an addition equation, then students would write it and use Target mini-erasers to model it. (Fun manipulatives like mini erasers are SO much easier to manage in small group than whole group; for one thing, fewer of them tend to walk away). Although most of the children at the table had successfully modeled 4 + 7 = ___, two students had placed four erasers under the number four and only three erasers under the number seven. Both of them had written 4 + 7 = 7 . "Oops!" I said, "You need four here and then seven here. How many do you have?" These students both counted "One, two, three, four," touching the erasers under the number four, and then continued "five, six, seven," as they counted the erasers under the number seven. This misconception manifested a few times in this particular pair of students, and in a few students in each of my other two small groups--and I would NOT have anticipated it. Connecting the right quantity of objects to the written numeral is an essential part of understanding what a number means, and making this concrete was essential for this group of learners. Luckily, because I was meeting with these students in a small group setting, I could 1) quickly notice their error 2) directly address their error by saying "Look, here is a seven. So you need seven erasers under it--but there are only three! Can you fix it?" 3) Observe whether they changed their representation following my advice, without other students getting off task (I gave the others in the group another equation to model). 4) Make a note of the error and be on the lookout for whether they made it again (they did) 5) Plan to address the importance of checking that you have represented the exact number in the equation in subsequent guided practice sessions. Some of the above would be possible during whole group guided practice. Then again, I might never have noticed a few students making this error, and never have helped them correct it. Of course, there are some challenges to guided math.
First, I don't monitor my students' worksheet work ("math by myself") and my para professional is only sometimes available to do so--so, some students spend that portion of the workshop repeating the same errors over and over. (Then again, that happened last year, when everyone did worksheets at the same time and I monitored them, too.) Second, it's really important that students understand that math tubs are part of doing math work, and that it is unacceptable to goof off during math tub time. I have dealt with goofing in three ways: 1) pushing myself to frequently change out the math activities to avoid boredom 2) explicitly teaching students to choose tubs they know how to play to avoid non-mathematical noodling 3) immediately sending goofers to take-a-break for the rest of the rotation and even removing a highly popular, frequently goofed tub as an option. Third, I'm not sure guided math requires much more planning than any careful implementation of a new-to-the-teacher math curriculum, but it's not less work to teach the same curriculum in a new format than it was to teach it for the first time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Earlier this summer I wrote about my plan to move into a Guided Math structure for my math block. I'm proud to say that, with a lot of help from other teachers' blog posts, Teachers Pay Teachers products, and existing math curricula, and a refresher on the Understanding by Design Process, I have crafted my first math unit of the year!
Here's the link to the full unit! The first unit is particularly difficult because not only are you teaching foundational content (or, hopefully, reviewing it), you are also introducing students to the structures that facilitate learning. Ultimately, I want to be able to spend 40-45 minutes of every math block with most of the class working independently while I meet with rotating small groups. But I can't expect students, especially ones who are just embarking on literacy, to independently figure out what they are supposed to do during centers or math by myself time. So, I relied heavily on a free resource from Reagan Tunstall, "How To Launch Guided Math: A Step-By-Step Guide" to figure out the order in which to introduce different activities and how to pace that introduction. Click through to read about how I chose and organized what to teach in the first four weeks. As the sweet math coach at my school knows, there is no part of my instruction that I tinker with more than math. I'm constantly finding her in the hallway to announce that I tried out a new resource or that I think I've finally solved the issue of off-task behavior during math time (spoiler alert: I haven't). For the coming year, I'm trying Guided Math to structure and differentiate my math instruction. In the gallery above I've linked some of the blog posts guiding (ha!) my thinking as I plan for this new format. I'm planning on a version of the Daily 3, as described originally by Gail Boushey, and as adapted by Catherine Reed (The Brownbag Teacher). The table below gives a rough sketch of how I'm planning to schedule my daily math block once Guided Math is up and running. So, why Guided Math? Click through to read about the two driving reasons. |
AuthorI'm Ms. Howland. I teach first grade in Spanish and English in a transitional bilingual model. Click any photo to learn more!
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