Stamina in the Math Classroom & The Twelve Days of Christmas

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping, ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree!

Have you ever stopped to think about how much that poor lady received by the twelfth day Christmas? Year after year, my fourth and fifth graders have decided that the guy wasn't her "true love" based on the amount of fowl he bequeathed on the poor woman. 

I would've called the cops!

                                                     Fifth grader

Math investigations like this are huge amounts of fun, especially when we're winding down toward winter break. The kids are a little crazy. You're very tired, and everything around you is a bit manic. 

But, we still have to teach, don't we? Yes. We do. 

Marilyn Burns, math guru extraordinaire, has a wish list for math investigations in the classroom. Like Santa doing his list checking, I tried to check off Marilyn's when I designed my 12 Days of Christmas problem solving venture. 

Day One:Setting the Stage

We began by viewing some funny online versions of the song. They can be found on youtube. We watched a modern-day video performed by two men who acted out every animal in the song. 

Then, we viewed a wordless version, set in Victorian times,  that humorously pointed out just how ludicrous the gifts are in the song. We talked about the history of it (it's really old), and then we sang the it. We even wrote our own modern versions.

My students come from different backgrounds. Not all celebrate Christmas. That's okay. We talked about how it's a counting song for the Christmas season. It was a history lesson, not a religious holiday lesson.

Finally, we asked our math question: How much did she receive by the twelfth day? 

Math is Creative

Math is creative. There are many ways to investigate the same problem.

                                             - Ms. Willis
On day two, my students worked independently to devise a strategy for answering our question from the day before.  We used the Claim-Support-Question visible thinking routine to support us at this point. Some drew pictures. Others used tally marks. A couple of kids noticed a numerical pattern. Two or three students tried making a data table. I kept a close eye on my special education students and allowed them to work together on this part if it was necessary.  

I would not confirm their answers yet, because I wanted students to focus more on the process they were developing.  At the end of the session, they met in groups of four to share their strategies and the thinking behind them.  They were not allowed to share any answers. 

Your Brain Isn't Fried

Once tried doesn't mean your brain is fried!

                                                                                                 -Ms. Willis
By day three, most of my students had solutions.  Many, if not most, were incorrect. They wanted me to give them the answer. I refused.  Why? Because problem-solving stamina is important.  Our kids need to develop this.  We don't give up at the first sign of challenge. No. We. Don't.  They went back to their strategies. 

I asked questions to help them with their thinking. That is how I supported them. Students who had a correct solution were given the challenge of finding another way to prove their answers. Just like scientists who repeat experiments over and over again to justify their research, mathematicians search for other proofs, too.  This was an "a-ha!" moment for many students. 

The special education students I worked with also developed strategies.  Depending on the strategy they used, the amount of math it required, and their IEP goals and accommodations, I allowed some to use a calculator.  

Group Sharing & Celebrations

Finally on day four, students met in small groups to share solutions and strategies.  We identified the correct answer. We also created a mentor chart of the all the strategies tried. We named them after their authors. For example, "The Charlotte Strategy." We took a step back from the problem to discuss the type of thinking we engaged in. We use Ron Ritchart's Cultures of Thinking and Making Thinking Visible approaches at our school. Many students thought we were "uncovering complexities." Others thought we were "reasoning with evidence." The coolest part was discovering that we had traveled around the entire Understanding Map with this one math investigation!

Students ended day four with taking the song lyrics and math question home to their parents to challenge them to solve it. Their parents had homework to solve, and my students got to coach them on math strategies. 

I think Marilyn Burns would be proud of us. I know I am. 

The resources I used for this math investigation are below. You can try the Claim-Support-Question routine for free!

Psssst! Hey, yeah you! What does the Fox say? He says, "Be sure to follow Wild Child's Mossy Oak Musings. If you do, you get a monthly freebie in your mailbox EVERY MONTH!"

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4 Ways to Balance Reading & Writing Instruction

Nicki pinned me to the sky, like Mrs. Brown pinning our constuction paper snowmen to the classroom bulletin board. I gripped the handles tightly while my legs dangled uselessly from the teeter totter seat. 

"Put me down!" I ordered. 

"Make me!" she sneered. 

I began to bounce on the seat and swung my legs wildly.  But, it was no use, I was at her mercy. I hung there and plotted my revenge. When I got the chance, I left her dangling in the air and let her down with a huge bump on the ground. 

Teaching language arts is a lot like the playground teeter totter torment that filled our recess time in grade school. There should be a balance between our reading and writing instruction. But with recent laws that focus on reading performance and student retention being enacted around the United States, the curriculum focus has shifted to reading instruction. Regardless of what research on language arts learning tells us, retention laws and the curriculum mandates that follow are not in the best interest of our students. 

What we know is that reading and writing skills develop hand-in-hand, and that as soon as we teach them in isolation or ignore one to give more time to the other, we cripple our students thinking skills and language development. In fact, it's imperative that we feel the same urgency with writing instruction as we do with reading. "How?" you ask. Your teaching practices need to be equitable. No subject should be left hanging in the air on the language arts teeter totter. You need to strike a balance. The teaching practices you implement in your reading block should be implemented in your writing block.

Guided Reading/Guided Writing

In reader's workshop, we teach guided reading and strategy groups. If you have equitable language arts instruction, then you also teach writing in small groups.  In order to do this, you have to know your writers. Here's how I do it:

• I give a writing pre-assessment for the unit we're on. We use Writing Pathways by Lucy Calkins, but you can do this with any writing rubric or scoring initiative your district mandates.
• I create a "nugget sheet." This is a simple spreadsheet on which I list my students in alphabetical order and the writing goals of our current unit at the top. I enter their scores for each writing goal (elaboration, conventions, development, structure, etc.).
• I highlight areas of concern on the spreadsheet.
• I group students by those areas of concern. 
• I either meet with them one on one, or I call them together for a guided writing/writing strategy group lesson. This takes place after the mini-lesson of the day, and it usually lasts about 10 minutes. 

Guided writing helps me differentiate for my students and gives me another chance to watch them while they practice.

Suck It Up, Buttercup

Write With Your Students

For many teachers, one of the scariest parts of teaching writing is that you must write with your students. Every day in reader's workshop, you probably read aloud to your kids. While you read aloud, you stop and think aloud. You make comments. You ask questions. You model what readers do when they read.

Do you model what writers do when they write? Young writers need to see their teachers writing aloud.  They need to hear the thinking their teachers are doing while they make writing decisions, while they make writing mistakes, and while they make writing revisions. In order to do this, you gotta suck it up buttercup and do what you are asking your students to do. NO EXCUSES. This practice is too powerful to ignore.

Copycat Your Favorites 

& Bridge Both Workshops

This requires some thinking and planning on the part of the teacher, but WOW! Does it work! When we teach reading, we teach students about figurative language, idioms, proverbs, puns, and descriptive language. In fact if you ask, many teachers will tell you that these are some of their favorite lessons to teach. They are fun, aren't they? 

But are you teaching students how to write these? One of our huge fifth grade writing goals is for students to develop writer's craft. During reader's workshop while I'm reading aloud, I'll stop and identify sentences where the author has used figurative or descriptive language. We'll talk about why the author chose the words she did. We'll write the lines down on chart paper and talk about how they help us visualize and understand what we are reading. 

Then later, in our writing block, we'll go back to those lines on the chart paper. We'll pick a lackluster line or passage from our own writing, and we'll try to copy what the author did. We don't use her words, but we use her strategy or technique. 

If you do this enough, use your mentor text as a bridge between your reading and writing instruction, you'll begin to see your students thinking as writers. Which, by the way, develops analytical thinking, one of the deepest forms of comprehension. 

Make the connection between reading and writing visible.

Stamina: It's Not Just About Reading

As teachers, we put so much energy into building our students' reading stamina. We want our kids to read at home. We provide independent reading opportunities in our classrooms. We graph our minutes read in data notebooks. We send home reading logs. But what are we doing to build our students' writing stamina?

One of the ways I help my students "train" to increase their writing stamina is by assigning 20-30 minutes of free writing a night. It's funny, but as soon as I say the words "free write," there are gasps of delight. My students know that they will be able to share their writing at the end of the week. This, alone, is a HUGE motivation for them.

At the beginning of the year, I set the routine of using stamina journals. One week, I ask my students to read every night. The next week, I ask my students to write every night. They reflect on their writing stamina every morning, from the night before, using a stamina reflection chart. They graph their writing minutes in their data notebooks. They discuss the quality of their writing sessions. We talk about what writer's do when they lack focus. We brainstorm ways to help ourselves write stronger and longer. This type of problem solving is something we do in reader's workshop. But guess what? It works in writer's workshop, too.

I hope this blog post has given you some take-aways to enrich your language arts instruction. Some of the resources I use in my writer's workshop are below. They're a great place to start if you're wanting to empower your student writers. Some are free!

                                     

         

This week I've linked up with some FABULOUS educators for our monthly Teacher Talk focus. Check them out below!

An InLinkz Link-up

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