Very exciting, fresh, new.
Extremely knackering.
With my previous blog, I felt I had got to a point with helping older primary children become inquiring mathematicians with less and less input from me their teacher.
Starting fresh in the younger years, I don't expect this blog to be as helpful, but I thought it would be interesting for me to reflect on how I can apply inquiry-based learning strategies with upper primary children with lower.
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Sometimes you make something up on the spot to continue exploring with the remaining ten minutes before the recess bell rings. This was one of those moments and I was really amazed with the great thinking that took place.
We have been exploring cuisenaire rods and already determined the value each has.
In 2 minutes, make a picture using the rods. It could be a plant, a building, an animal, a person. Its up to you.
(Note: We only had rods for 1 to 5)
Here were some ideas:
After the 2 minutes, we then needed to think of a strategy to find the total value of all the rods we used to make our picture.
We had a photo paper showing the value of each rod to help remember.
This is when some very interesting strategies were explored.
This learner explained how he thought it was interesting that this both equalled 12 and started thinking why with rods nearby:
This learner thought of using a 'making 10 / compensation' strategy to add the numbers more easily:
This learner recorded how many of each rod value she had used as a beginning why to add:
This learner decided to put the rods in rows of 10; she explained that it was then easy to count by tens and see how many units were left over:
This learner created a strategy of trying to put the rods into groups valuing 5 each:
He then put his groups of 5s in a row and explained how he could now just skip count easily by 5 to get the total (he also thought it very lucky that his total was a multiple of 5 so he didn't have any left over units to count :) )
This learner was inspired by classmate and took the idea further by finding out how many of each rod value he had as a beginning way to find the total:
This learner noticed there were lots of 2s so decided to skip count by 2s first and then found other numbers to skip count by:
To share and reflect, I took videos of some of the children explaining their strategies on their Seesaw accounts. We then watched these on our data screen: instant engagement - all eyes were 100% focused on listening.
In our reflection discussion, we noticed how there are many different ways we can see numbers and that there are many different strategies we can use to add.
These are some pretty great big ideas for us to discover and further explore.
When we give children opportunities to explore, create and make their own discoveries with numbers, amazing thinking can happen.
A worksheet, I think, prevents children from being true mathematicians making their own discoveries, testing their own theories, experimenting with what works and doesn't work and making sense of numbers in ways that have real meaning to them.
I really loved the creative thinking that took place with this and could see this also being used in upper primary years perhaps with all the rod values being used......
