Post date: Apr 4, 2018 11:52:00 AM
After lunch one day I decided to pop into a second grade class to see students dissecting a story problem. I walked around the room observing and asking questions until I finally stopped at a boy’s desk because I saw his paper was completely blank. Knowing the student, I knew if he had a blank paper for much longer there would be some disruption, so I knelt by his desk and started asking him questions about the problem. He was having difficulty grasping the problem’s concept and I wasn’t going to just give him the answer, so we went and sat in the hallway so we could work. After about three different verbal approaches I said, “Let’s go to the resource room bud!” I knew there were some manipulatives in the room that might help give the student a more concrete way to see the problem.
We got to the room, I let him choose which box of manipulatives we were going to use, and we were off. Using the manipulatives enabled my friend to visualize the actions in the problem, set up a number sentence, and we proceeded to show me some math strategies I had never seen—I grew up in the traditional algorithm days!
We meet our students where they are. We don’t let them fail. We believe they can do it given the right supports.
ML 4/4/2018