Support Math Day 5: Circle Talk Day 2 and More Number Talks

Today we started class with our second circle talk.  We did a quick check-in round to see how everyone was doing.  To no surprise, it was mostly 1 word answers by everyone.  We will have to come up with something to work on that.

Then we played about 4 rounds of Would You Rather.  I found this excellent set of would you rather questions online.  It is from the Measured Mom blog.  It is aimed at younger kids, but by selecting the right questions and aging up some others, it will be a great resource.  The kids had a great time and they got homework.  They were each asked to create a "would you rather" question for circle time tomorrow.  Hopefully the questions are appropriate and lead to some good answers.

Circle today created some fun moments with the kids and I can already start to see the sense of community starting to build among these students.  It might all be based on the fact that they are "getting out of doing normal math" but I will take that for right now.

The number talk we did today was a step up in difficulty from yesterday.  We took 20-25 minutes breaking it down.  Most students really dug into it and wouldn't give up.  We eventually arrived at a nice formula for triangular numbers.  Are they going to remember that, probably not.  Right now though it is about not giving up and sticking with hard problems.

In 8th grade math today, we tackled some tough patterns to talk about linear patterns.  The students in TIP math did really well.  I hope that the foundation for that was partly laid down in TIP math by working with difficult patterns the last couple days of class.  

So things are off to a great start so far.  We are building a good foundation for a couple of my 4 pillars of support math.