1. Is it easy to use?
2. Will the students enjoy it?
3. Will the students learn from it?
This little ditty is about something I LOVE and haven't written about in a while. Listening and Math. The biggest struggle as a teacher has always been keeping the kiddos engaged while teaching, and assessing how everyone is doing (are they getting it?). Teachers.... WE JUST NEED TO KNOW EVERYONE IS GETTING IT!!!! Right? With a class of 28+ students, that's not always the easiest task.
In my class we did math warm ups every day. We started with our math binders. This daily routine included tons of math vocabulary, review, and number sense. The biggest part of all of those things was the listening. If the students weren't listening, they weren't learning. I enjoyed the math binders and our math white boards because students had a chance to show me right away their work/answers. I could see quite easily who was struggling (those lost looking eyes that wandered around the room looking for answers). My teacher brain was able to identify these students right away and you can bet I was paying closer attention to how they were doing with the activities. I could keep the students engaged by asking them to "show me their work'. In 2nd grade, our warm ups looked a lot different than they did in Kinder. However, the ideas were the same. Use tons of math vocabulary, get the kids interested in what we were doing, keep them on task and focused, and see how everyone was doing while teaching (sounds easy enough right). Few... Not so much.
The math binders helped, math journaling helped, and the 100's, 200's chart work helped. However, for my kinder kiddos, they needed so much more. That's when I came up with a daily routine called :
Listen to me Math. It needed to be fun, fairly simple, easy to teach, keep the students engaged and above all... teach them what they needed to know.
Each "lesson" comes with step by step teacher directions. Students have the student "copy". I always made myself one as well. When we started out, I always did the first few with the students (together). We would talk about what we were doing and what my directions were. We would check our work as we went. As the students progressed in their listening and math skills, I was able to give the directions (step by step) and then students were able to "grade" or check their work on their own when I went over it. This was a pretty important step I don't want to leave out. This is where the learning (not just practicing) comes in. When the students are able to check their work, this gives them a chance to see (possibly) what they did wrong. They correct it with a crayon (or highlighters which they love). This is when I fix my copy on the ELMO (overhead). I can see right away as I look around the room who is missing problems and who is "getting it". Often times, the ones struggling simply needed to listen more. They had to stay focused on the task at hand because my directions just kept going. This was hard at first (I can't lie). Listening and doing is harder then it sounds for 6 year olds! But it is a really useful tool.
Now.... here comes the part I actually enjoyed the most. I was able to pull the students that had a harder time during our centers or even during independent math time. We were able to go over the warm up. (Have a fresh copy on hand)
This was a great time to see who needed more time, who needed me to slow down and go over things again, and who just didn't know how to do the math. Do they need work on number sense, vocabulary, etc.?