Celebrate- this week! Trust

Thank you @Ruth_Ayers of Ruth Writes for this wonderful #Celebratelu! It's so refreshing to end the week reflecting on all the celebrations!

This week I am celebrating the thinking of my class and trust in the kids, trust in the workshop & trust in student lead learning! For a few years now I have been refining my math workshop. It's been a tremendously tedious process and all along the way I knew it was the right thing to do.  I had witnessed the power of a workshop in guiding readers and writers and I knew this same framework could apply to math learning.  I searched for resources and support and I followed the learners of our classroom.  I posted more about my journey here.

Well, here we are in May, the year is all to quickly pulling to a close. This is a bittersweet time in teaching. We witness the successes of hard work and the growth of our children, but at the same time we collect data, data, data and MORE data! We rejoice and mourn that the sweet faces in front of us that have bloomed and outgrown our classroom, it's a time of bittersweet good-byes.

I need to get back on target with this post, A CELEBRATION POST- So this week I celebrate trust in the kids, trust in the workshop & trust in student lead learning in our MATH WORKSHOP!

Grace and her partner discovered/explored odd and even numbers.  (This isn't a topic we have discussed in our classroom, but both students have older brothers, maybe they heard their brothers talk about odd and even.)  This is a celebration because of the learning these two discovered independently and the connections they made. When the girls came to share their "Math, AHHA!" they explained that there was a number pattern that repeats in both odd and even numbers. When Grace was challenged by a peer she pointed our that when you have 9 then 19 its a patten because-"Well, if you take the one, I mean ten, away from the 19 you have a 9 and take two tens from 29 you still have 9 and it just goes on with the same ones each time" WOW!
Trust in the kids, trust in the workshop & trust in student lead learning!

 Jonathan wanted to explore "times tables" (again the influence of an older sibling). When Jonathan brought this idea to me I asked him, "How is multiplication like addition?" then I walked away.  I wanted to make sure Jonathan was building an understanding of multiplication and not just reciting facts. Trust in the kids, trust in the workshop & trust in student lead learning!

Another discovery by Grace! Grace took a risk and realized she could do addition and subtraction with 2 digit numbers. Grace's understanding of ten helped her as she added tens and ones. Trust in the kids, trust in the workshop & trust in student lead learning!