Wow! Two weeks from Monday I start school. I cannot believe it. Yesterday afternoon was the first day we could get back into our classrooms and begin cleaning and setting them up for the start of the year. That's not a lot of time, so today's blog is going to be short, but don't let that fool you because the topic can mean the difference between finally understanding a concept or not.
Persevere. According to dictionary.com persevere is a verb which means to persist in anything undertaken; maintain a purpose in spiteof difficulty, obstacles, or discouragement; continue steadfastly. Persevere is also part of the first Mathematical Practice standards of the Common Core.
Encouraging students to persevere in a mathematical problem or any type of creative activity is important because it causes them to figure out obstacles and overcome them. It allows them, through trial and error sometimes, to come to a solution on their own. It also allows students to take ownership over a task and gain a sense of accomplishment and empowerment.
Perseverance in math is what I worked on with two of my tutoring students this week. I don't have anything cute or fun to show you in the typical sense, but I can say the feeling my students and I had at the end of the sessions were ones of success and pride. So that was fun and the smiles on their faces were definitely cute.
My third grade student is working on division. We were playing a game called Egg Nest. In this game, the student chooses between 8-32 eggs (counters) and then rolls a die to determine the number of nests (squares) to be drawn. The eggs are then equally divided into the nests and any leftovers are put next to the group of nests. In the picture below, Puneet chose 9 eggs and rolled a 6 for 6 nests. He started putting 2 eggs in each nest and realized he was left with 2 empty nests and 1 egg. He was stumped. He really did not know what to do. I asked him questions that made him think about how he could solve the problem. It took Puneet several attempts at solutions before he came up with the correct one. He first put one egg in each nest and said to put the extras back in the bag. Then he started over, dividing the eggs again. Finally, he realized he could just leave the extras to the side and include them in the equation.
Then we moved on to try and solve division equations on a program called TenMarks.
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| He didn't know what to do with the one left over. |
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| Persevering in solving division problems with counters. Trying to determine how many counters to begin with and how to equally divide them. Learning that being organized is helpful. |
Next, I went over some other problems that he got incorrect on his TenMarks assessment. Again, we looked at the problem, and he reworked it and saw where he went wrong. That was powerful learning!
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| As stated in CCSS, part of perseverance is making sense of the problem. We needed to determine which words were important and what the meant. |
The problem with encouraging students to persevere is of course the time element we as teachers all struggle with. It takes students, and any of us for that matter, time to struggle through a problem and find a solution. It takes time to figure out where we went wrong and how to find a correct answer or solution. Sometimes, unfortunately, I feel the pressure to move onto the next activity so I "help" students discover the answers or the solutions. This takes away some of their ownership. My goal this year is to try to allow for more time for to persevere because I truly believe that is where real learning takes place.
Here is a link to an excellent video that shows a fifth grade teacher engaging her students in a fun activity while challenging them to persevere in solving the problem as a group. This was the first video I ever watched on perseverance and where I realized how fun, yet powerful it can be.
I hope everyone has a great start to the school year. I may not be blogging next week. All depends on how much work I get accomplished in my room. Until we blog again.
Kim and Anne
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