Patterns!

I have to tell you how amazing the past week has been!  My sweet class has done an amazing job with our new math series.  Thanks to some strategies I picked up at a conference this past summer, I've incorporated some new 'stuff' into my teaching and it's really paid off!  At a Math Literacy Camp that I attended at MTSU, we were given multiple resources to take back to our class.  If you haven't read Patterns in Peru, its a must.  The children love decorating their own tunics with various patterns on them.

Here are the graffiti board and carousel model used together to create a vin diagram.  A graffiti board is used by writing a single 'term' in the middle and having students explain their initial understanding of the term; the teacher can record correct and incorrect answers, then the class can go through the ideas recorded and self-correct for greater understanding.  The carosel model is used when you have 3 or more terms that you'll be conveying to students.  This is an excellent tool to use as a pre-assessment.  The children work in small groups to record their thoughts on the terms.  I walk around and monitor the students while taking anecdotal notes on the conversations and recording what the students are writing/drawing on the board.