Purposely Vague

I recently attended a math training and while it wasn't earth-shattering revelations, I did enjoy this snippet:

Be purposefully vague.

That's right, be vague in your questioning.  Let them struggle.  Let them make meaning of the problem.  Let them talk it out and try multiple strategies.  Let them persevere.  Let them come up with several answers and justify them to one another.  Let them express their thinking and critique others.  But again, most importantly:

Let them struggle.

It's productive, I promise.  They need to struggle.  It's not helpful to let them get all the answers right away. It's not helpful to spoon feed them the answers.  Not everything in life comes easily and they need to understand struggle so that when they work through the problems, they are that much more excited about their success.  Not every problem is given with the purpose of finding the one correct answer, but rather an emphasis should be placed on the problem solving strategies and critical thinking that lead to the answer(s).  Give meaningful, complex problems that are based on real world situations.  Don't provide problems where the solutions can be easily googled.  Let them struggle.  They'll be better students if they learn to persevere through problems and work on their critical thinking skills.  Provide the necessary scaffolds, yes, but not the answers right away.  Ask them questions rather than give them answers.  Challenge them. Encourage them. Inspire them.

Be vague.  Let them struggle. Let them do the thinking.

Week 1 Recap

One week done!

I don't think I've ever been more exhausted after just the first week of school.

Here's the recap, by subject:

Reading

We set up our notebooks for whole group reading and word study.  We went over what makes a syllables, long and short vowel sounds, silent e and closed syllables.  We'll continue with this next week and have a culminating activity where students break apart their own names by syllables and justify how this helps them break apart multisyllabic words.  We also went over metacognition and made our own reflections about books (what we loved, what we are excited to read, what we didn't like and what challenging books we hope to read later in the year)  based on this pin:

We then went over norms for read alouds.  

We started The Lightning Thief and did a few read alouds to set our class norms.

Science

We set up our notebooks, did mystery bags and talked about what it means to be a good scientist, as evident in this anchor chart:

We will add to it as we continue to have discussions about what we do as scientists.  

We also worked with meal worms and made some technical drawings in our notebooks:

We will start the land forms kit next week!

Math

We went over most of the math practices and did sample problems that support these practices.  One that stumped my students was this:

On a boat, there are 17 hippos and 12 rhinos.  How old is the captain? (NCTM)

Students argued and argued about how to solve this problem.  I let them have a good twenty minutes to debate this in their table teams before filling them in on a little secret...

There simply isn't enough information to solve this problem.  

They weren't very happy with me but I pointed out that they were sure the answer was 29.  I said yes, that's how many animals are on the boat but that's not what was being asked of you.  We have to work on making sense of the problem (SMP #1).

They also had to find as many times in a 12 hour period where the digits on a digital clock would add up to twelve.

Here are their answers:

They actually had a lot of fun with the math problems, which bodes well for the school year.

I didn't ask for their answers right away.  Instead, I wanted their strategies and to talk about how they solved the problem instead of just giving the answer.

Writing

We set up our writing notebooks and started using our Being a Writer unit, starting with getting ideas from fairy tales for stories.  We read some alternative fairy tales, including this new book I just purchased from Amazon:

The rest of the time was spent setting class norms, building community and getting to know each other:

I'm excited for week 2 :)