Routines. I am sure this will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I thrive on routines. I like the planning of them. I like the predictability of them. I like to familiarity of them. And I have noticed that many students also really seem to crave routines.
I was asked recently about how I plan for math in my classroom as a colleague is going to for an interview with a new board. This educator has been working as an occasional teacher and hasn't had to plan a math program for their own classroom. It was great timing as I had been thinking about my math routine as I am working to layer in new pieces and to solidify our literacy routine (which is proving to be a harder task).
I like to have a weekly routine for math which includes the daily Minds On. Years ago I worked with a group of educators at my school and then in a wider community within out family of schools looking at spiralling the math curriculum and it really helped to cement my belief in how I think math should be taught to ensure "sticky learning".
This TedTalk was the spark for our work and it's a must see!
As I plan for my math program, I am always working on spiralling through the curriculum and constantly re-touching a variety of topics. I am currently using the SCDSB's Scope and Sequence to plan the major components while looking at ways to spiral back.
For our Minds On on Mondays we do a “Which One Doesn’t Belong” that helps support their ability to communicate their thinking using math vocabulary.
Tuesday and Thursday we do an activity called “Roll and Write” which involves a differentiated menu that works on their math fluency with adding and multiplication. They work through at their own pace.
Each morning the students do a Poll of the Day (which will eventually lead into our data management learning) and a few times a week we do a morning math meeting which a gives me time to do small mini lessons on different topics.
Right now we are focusing on adding and subtracting tens patterns and doubles. I will change out the topics as we spiral through the curriculum. Starting this week we will be adding in multiplication, identifying repeating and growing patterns, and skip counting.
After two or so months of following these routines I think we are ready to start layering in Math Journals so students can start to communicate their math knowledge in various ways. We started with this modeled example and discussed how it showed our thinking by using math vocabulary, numbers, operations, pictures and how we organized our response.
I then discussed our Math Journal success criteria and we read through our first problem, which was about place value, 2-digit and 3-digit numbers. I haven't yet assessed their journals to see how they did (it's on Monday's To-Do list!) and then we will decide our next steps.
If you've made it this far in my blog, I bet you are thinking that I must have a really good handle on my Literacy Routine... and you would be wrong. This year, like many others, I feel like I am constantly assessing, reacting and working to plan to meet students where they are on their reading and writing journey. Unlike other years, I am also on my own learning journey connected to the Science of Reading, phonics, orthographic mapping, fluency, and more. I am also finding that my students needs range from working on developing their knowledge of letter sounds, decoding CVC words and those with digraphs and blends, to reading full chapter books in the course of an evening. Many of my students are working on proper letter formation and need support with sentence stems and/or scribing to write simple sentences. I also have students who are ready to explore paragraphs. It's the largest range of developmental steps I have seen in a Grade 3 classroom.
I had a conversation about this with my admin as we approached writing progress reports. I wondered how to deal with the "progressing well" vs "progressing with difficulty" options. (And why there isn't a "progressing" option available?) In year's past I would have assessed many of my students as "progressing with difficulty" based on what I was seeing in my my class in terms of decoding and writing. However, this year it's a full third to half my class. So in the ongoing discussion of "learning gaps" due to the pandemic, maybe they aren't "behind" maybe this is just what Grade 3 is right now (and for the next little bit)?
And they are "progressing". We are at the point now where most of my students have mastered all their letters sounds, can decode CVC words and are working to understand CVCe words. Our spelling is aligned with our reading work and I can see students working to segment letter sounds as they write. We are progressing, dare I say we are progressing well?
So back to my literacy routine. It's been haphazard at best. The components are there. We are reading. We are writing. We are spelling. We look at grammar. We've talked about the elements of a story. We read out loud. We are working on answering comprehension questions together.
But is it a routine?
Nope.
I am hoping to start a routine that follows a two-week cycle so that we can work through all the different types of literacy tasks and components. I want to start working with smaller groups of students and think that by adopting a two week cycle for our routine I'll be able to organize the materials and activities for this. It must also be said that the students have not quite demonstrated that they are fully ready for this (it's been an ongoing goal) so it will be a joint effort as we adopt this new routine and work on our ability to complete task independently.
I do think that a routine for our literacy work is necessary and needed. I have noticed that students are excited and ready for learning in math when they know which Minds On we are going to explore each day. They express which activities they enjoy the most and look forward to participating. The next 10 or so days will provide more information as to what activities work on which days and in which order. We will also be layering in our Writer's Workshop as students are demonstrating that they are ready to explore some free choice in writing and writing forms. Maybe this iteration of our routine will hit the mark. Maybe it won't.
Thankfully, we have time to keep working on it.
After all, the curriculum expectations are end of year goals, are they not?
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