Getting down to work with Math Workshop...

I can not believe that this is the fourth Wednesday that we have been in school!! My kinders are getting into the swing of things nicely. Today I want to share my basic workshop model. I set my time into 4 sections: 1) warm-up/ number talks, 2) journals, 3) guided math/ mini lesson, 4) tubs/ small group. Now let's talk about what each of those mean to me.

Number talks are new to my workshop this year and already they are the superhero of math workshop. I have used number cards for several years now, but they always felt contrived. This summer I did some youtube searching for teachers working with dot cards and children. Some videos were better than others but what I learned is that if you are just "flashing" cards you are missing out! We have spent the last two weeks working on the procedures and talk that surround dot cards. For example when I hold a card up my children place a finger on their noise when they know the number. Right now I am not flashing cards but leaving them up long enough for kids to count. Also we are only using dot cards 1-6 right now. Why 6 and not stop at 5? Honestly, I didn't get all the 6's out of my stack when I started this year. 

I personally own Deedee Wills all the credit for math journals! Man does she rock them. We have been using her Math journal prompts and the kids are getting excited each day to see what their question is.  I love the growth we see in using a math journal. I want to dive into to math journals as it's own post at a later time. 

This is the biggest area of growth for me personally. I have always used math small groups as RTI for math. I really want to grow this area of my teaching to match what I do in literacy stations. I am working on a post for that as well. 

So there it is... Workshop Wednesday ;) Until next time...