Math Workshop Monday: Part 2

Sorry for the delay! Mid-winter break, vacation to sunshine, and the crazy life of being a full time teacher and grad student took over. Anyways, as promised, here is another look at how we do Math Workshop in my room. . . .

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Some of you were probably curious, when I listed off the four work options for the students, meeting with me for small group was not one of those options. Trust me, I tried that. Remember at the beginning of last post, I shared openly about the many failures I was encountering trying to teach math. That was one scenario. I tried teaching a small group during the workshop time, but with the group I have it just wasn't working. My table ended up doing a whole lot of waiting for me to help other friends sign on to the computer, adjust headphones, explain the math tub for the thousandth time, or even just deal with behavior issues. Those poor babies weren't getting anything from me, and everyone was beyond frustrated. 

So what am I doing then? Well besides all of the above tasks, I am free to walk around the room and sit with a child that I see is struggling, or even one that wants to show me how they just solved a problem and be with them. I can help my enrichment group with a project, work with my low students who need me, or help one student work through a new math game on the computer. It's extremely rewarding and a whole lot less stressful for everyone. Imagine the shortest mini lesson possible, that's what I'm doing. One to two minute mini lessons with each student, multiple times. Trust me, they are still learning A LOT! Honestly, it's not what I really wanted, but my room works so much better this way and my kids are making so much progress!!!!! 

 

Besides the "mini lesson" meet ups and management, I also help students with their math interactive notebooks. They have notebooks that they use roughly 2x per week to review, practice, or introduce new concepts. They can refer back to these all the time during workshop and it's a great formative assessment and mini lesson tool. We use three different notebook products, the first is the amazing notebooks by Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits. The second is a product designed to fit with out Singapore Math curriculum by Kelly Spinks Lastly, I create some notebook entries to combine it all together. 

Journal entries above taken from Turnstall Tidbits

 

Journal entries above were created by me! 

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Thanks for stopping by! Next Monday (hopefully) I will be wrapping it up with the organization behind it all. Where the kids are when? How they know what to do? Where are the materials?
Happy Monday!