So happy to be here talking about Guided Math in the Upper Elementary and Middle School classroom once again. If you missed last week’s post, feel free to jump back over and check it out.
For years I had students working on a warm-up when they entered my classroom. Middle school students were reluctant at times to get this started much less complete it during the time allowed. All of this led toward frustration for me and therefore the connection wasn’t built for them to truly enforce their skills.
In the most recent years I started using those first crucial minutes as the “Mad Minutes” in my classroom. Students used that time to prepare for our lesson to begin. I noticed that since this time was crucial for them to be prepared they truly did use it wisely.
Students would walk into the classroom, grab the materials for the day from the table next to the door, look at the directions on my screen and get busy. This typically was to prepare their Interactive Notebook for the day (title, date, update Table of Contents, and cut the flippable for the day if we had one).
This did allow students a few moments to get their wiggles out as well as they were interacting and previewing the materials for the day to develop some connection to prior knowledge. This also gave me those crucial moments to take care of the necessary teacher business in the beginning of a class.
Connections made to Math in Real World are important beyond measure. One of the ways that I started concentrating on this in my classroom is bringing my students names and interests into the word problems that we solved. What better way to engage them?
My Solve and Snips are all based on real students, real interests and real world problems. Not only do the quick 10 problems engage students to work through things that they may not necessarily connect with being mathematical but they are also self-checking.
Have you grabbed your copy yet? Well, take a moment, hop on over to Amazon and grab it today! You won’t be disappointed with all the goodness that Laney has to offer!
Another week, another giveaway! Make sure to enter to win as you won’t want to miss out on this great prize!
Don’t forget to check out the other teachers who are participating in the Guided Math Book Study for all of their insights on Chapter 3.
