It has been a super busy summer so far! I'm teaching summer school (reading intervention for grades 3-5) and we just finished up our third of five weeks! Two weeks to go and then I get another two week vacation before heading back to school! I'm starting at a new school in the fall and I'll be teaching all subjects, so my principal sent me to a week-long Math Workshop training this week and, although it has been incredibly exhausting, I have loved it and wanted to share some highlights and resources with you guys!
Math Workshop is similar to reading workshop in that it involves short minilessons, a lot of independent work, guided groups, and conferring. What I like most about this model is that it does away with the teacher standing at the board doing math problems and teaching strategies and puts the power and responsibility of learning into the students' hands. In Math Workshop the students are presented with challenging problems and hands-on activities and have to work together and use the tools that they already have to figure things out.
During our training we got to "be the student" and experience the three different workshop structures and it was so much fun! Seriously...I was engaged and having fun all week and I hope that my students love this model as much as I do!
Opening: Every lesson begins with an opening, which is pretty much a warm up or problem of the day that somehow relates to the lesson of the day. Students are asked to do some kind of mental math and then they share their thinking with the teacher. The teacher then records student thinking on the board and asks if other students arrived at their answer the same way. If not, the teacher asks the others to share the strategy that they used. The great thing about this part is that it allows students to see that you can use a number of different strategies to arrive at the same answer and there is no wrong way!
Our facilitators recommended this book for some great Number Talks to use during opening:
Independent Work Stations: Instead of doing timed rotations, during this part of the workshop students are given a menu of activities that they can do and they are allowed to choose the order in which they do them and can work at their own pace. I LOVE this because, as a teacher who has always done timed rotations, I know that not every student can complete the same task in the same amount of time and I often ended up with early finishers and/or unfinished work.
There are many ways to provide students with structured choice, but I plan on using Think-Tac-Toe boards and Math Menus this year.
Guided Math Groups: These groups should be flexible as they will be based on the specific skill or strategy that you are teaching on a given day. You can use a pre-assessment or informal observation to assign students to groups. What I like about this part is that you can meet with as many or as few groups as you want to and spend as much time with them as needed. I created a planning sheet to keep track of my groups and to plan our activities and take notes during meetings.
I will explain Math Tasks & Reflections in another post, but if you are interested in grabbing any of the resources that I created to organize/manage Math Workshop, you can find them in my TPT store here. Happy teaching!
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