We post a "core math idea" for the students to know our focus in math. Explaining a core math idea is part of our "best practices" for math instruction that all teachers are using in our school district.
In addition, as part of the best practices methods, the children are learning how to use "habits of mind" and "habits of interaction" in math and other subjects too. We will highlight a few of these here.
Two habits of mind the children worked on in this math lesson were:
to "make sense" of a problem
to "justify" or prove their thinking.
And, the habits of interaction they used were:
private reasoning time
explain my thinking
listen to understand
The children practiced all of these skills playing a domino game. Each child chose a domino and had private think time to figure out how many dots were on the domino. Then one child asked his/her partner, "What is your number and how do you know?" The first child listened to understand his/her partner's thinking and then had the chance to explain his/her thinking. They worked together to figure out which domino had more dots. Then the player with the higher number won the 2 dominoes (a game you can also play at home). All of this talk was to help the children verbalize and thus internalize addition strategies.
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