Home Studio: Streaming foundational math lessons for K-3

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2zrEjzXQ8RMmDHRp9rF9cw

Starting today, Thursday, March 19, I will livestream some foundational math lessons and activities. I’ll live stream Eastern Standard Time, Monday through Friday via YouTube and I really hope it works! I will do a back-up recording just in case and post it if the live stream doesn’t work.

9:00 for Kindergarteners and First Graders

10:00 for Second and Third Graders

The intent is to do some math together with the foundational skills of math and to give Caregivers some tips on how to bring joy and wonder into math at home. I’m possibly doing some groundbreaking on YouTube! Please do not expect perfection–I am learning too!

I will continue offering lessons because, as I see it, it’s good practice for me, I might be able to help a bunch of kids and caregivers out there figure out how to do the math thing together.

Caregivers, you have an amazing opportunity here: to get to know your child’s math mind! This is something that I get to do every day as a math interventionist. I get to celebrate the little milestones and the huge cognitive shifts with your child. Every day I go to work thinking of your child and what settings and activities I can do with them to help them move along in their thinking.

What I’m going to help you do is figure out where your child is in their range of numbers for counting forward, counting backward, and numeral identification. I’m going to introduce you to some activities that can be adapted to any number. We are going to start slow and build on what we know.

We are going to explore the Structure of Numbers. What that means is that we are going to notice and wonder about numbers and what chunks we see inside them. How can we use what we know to help us build new knowledge?

I am going to model questioning. I will offer advice and give resources when I can, but I certainly don’t want to overwhelm people!

For the Kindergarten sessions, it is recommended that the caregiver is sitting side-by-side with the child to help with the materials-making and number writing. When we are studying numbers, it’s important that the student is working with a good model, so the adult should write the numerals when the student is too young to produce correct numeral formation independently. Here is a great video for Numeral Writing practice–there are lots out there–I like the Numeral Song. It helps some kids to “talk to the hand” and say the words or sing the song to what they need to remember about number formation (same goes for letter formation).

The Numeral Song

Students should be encouraged to do as much as they can independently. We can increase independence by encouraging self-checking and I will give ideas on how to make that happen.

Why am I doing this?

I’m a parent of two kids myself, a 9 ½ and 12 year old (he’ll be 13 on May 26!). I got the idea from watching what my kids watch on YouTube. Sometimes my daughter watches another girl playing with dolls to get ideas. I thought, “I think I can do better than that!” I’ve actually been mulling this idea over in my head for quite sometime and this situation is speeding up the process. I chose YouTube as a platform because I think it engages a lot of kids who now have a lot of time at home.

It’s difficult navigating my kids’ schooling with my professional goals and need to connect with students, along with being together 24/7. We’ve got a schedule going and that really helps. Since we’re home together, we’re working on taking care of common spaces together. We’re working on being patient with each other, giving each other space, and developing our relationships.

For years, my daughter wouldn’t talk to me about her math thinking, but she’s finally let me in! She still shuts me down when she’s had enough, but we get to have some cool conversations about her math thinking. Hopefully you’ll get to witness some of that.

One thing that helps us and our relationship around math is that I am truly interested in understanding her thinking of the mathematics. Math is about reasoning and making sense. If it doesn’t make sense, then either you’ve got to work to have it make sense for you or maybe you need to step back and work with smaller numbers, or take a break altogether.

Who am I?

I’m just a teacher, doing my thing. As you see on the internet during these times, it is inundated with cries from teachers trying to figure out how to Home School, how to create “new normals” for this time. Do I have all of the answers? No. Is the way I do it the only way? No. Heck, there are teachers out there way more talented and way more knowledgeable than I am, but I can only “do” me and possibly serve as an inspiration for others.

I’m a math teacher, a math interventionist specifically. That means that I work with kids to help them gain knowledge and skills to be an independent thinker in their grade level math class. There’s a lot involved, but perhaps most important is to have a Growth Mindset, give yourself time to think, and revise your thinking as you go.

There’s more about me on my website www.whosevoiceinmathclass.com . I started this Website about a year ago and haven’t added much because I haven’t had time. Now I do have the time to commit to it! I have to say that jumping in with both feet is risky, but I’m hopeful that I will learn a lot. I am going to be putting myself out there and feel vulnerable, yet feel all of the support of my family and friends around me.

I will need feedback about how the sessions are going and how I can improve them. It will definitely be low-tech at first!

How do you think about 8+8?

I was at my friend’s house the other day describing this cool thing I saw a student do with 8+8, but before I went into my description, I asked her soon-to-be-third-grade son “how do you think about 8+8?”

He looked up toward to the ceiling and said, “8 and 8 is…8..12..16!”

I said, “How did you get that?”

He said, “I just knew it.”

I said, “I heard you whispering ‘8..12..16’…what were you doing there?”

“Oh! I thought about how 8 is two fours, so if I have 8 and add a four I get 12 and then add another 4, it’s 16!”

I turned to my friend and said, “See, right there, he used his understanding of the structure of numbers to figure out 8 and 8 without counting on by ones. That’s what we want our students to do once they understand that they can count on as a strategy.”

Her son wasn’t thinking about this image below when he was solving, rather, he was using groups of four and probably adding through ten. He didn’t verbalize adding through ten which would be “8 and 2 more is 10, I have 6 more from the 8 and 6+10=16” so I don’t know if he did it.

A Number Rack or Rekenrek https://apps.mathlearningcenter.org/number-rack/

Once kids realize that they don’t have to count from one anymore when adding two collections, we want them to start to use their knowledge of the structure of numbers so they can do math mentally without counting by ones like “I saw 8 and 8 more is: 8–9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16” while tracking the 8 on their fingers. They know when to stop because they see a 5 and a 3 on their hands and they know that 5 and 3 are 8, so they are using some structuring to track their count.

If we flash just the left side of the rekenrek to second graders and have them talk about what they saw, we might hear, “I saw 5 reds on the top and 5 reds on the bottom, that’s 10. I saw 3 whites and 3 whites, that’s 6. So 10 +6=16.” I’d want them to also make sure to say that they saw 8 on the top and 8 on the bottom, so 8 and 8 is 16. And that’s the cool thing that I saw a student do with 8+8!

{Learning to Think Mathematically with the Rekenrek is an excellent resource to guide you if you’ve never used a rekenrek, which is a math tool that should be used with the guidelines. Using a the Rekenrek as a Visual Model for Strategic Reasoning in Mathematics is one of my favorite resources also. This Blog has links to even more guides and has video examples.}

We don’t want to start using the Rekenrek too early! We should be working on making sure that our students know all finger patterns on their fingers, can recognize regular dot patterns, and know all dot dice combinations. More to come in more blog posts. 🙂

Please feel free to leave a comment!

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

I painted this picture (of a picture I found online) a few years ago. It speaks to me because it reminds me of when I found my voice as an educator. I wanted to shout from the rooftops how excited I was about what I was thinking about my students or about my teaching. This is the opposite of how I’d spent my 22 years of classroom teaching, which was mostly behind closed doors, not realizing that what I was yearning for was for someone to talk to about my ideas as an educator. I found my thought-partners right here in my own district and at Mt. Holyoke College, through many years of coursework. All I have to do is start a conversation…and that’s what I’m doing here to start a conversation with a more global community of learners.

This blog is a space for educators to talk about what we notice our students doing in math class. What do we hear them saying? What do we see them doing? They’re showing us what they know, we just have to figure that out. It’s called “Whose Voice in Math Class?” because it’s here where we can have a platform to think about that question together. Thoughtful and respectful questions and comments are always welcomed!

The website will eventually contain activities and resources for teachers and parents. My primary audience is teachers, but I think this blog will be helpful for parents as well.