Grandville — While teacher Emily Gorno settled onto a rug at the front of her classroom with a handful of second-graders for a math lesson, a small group of her other students took out an activity of their own at table 3. They studied the variety of colorful objects in tubs on the table to figure out their game plan, and then got to work.
At one end of the table, August Siegersma drew a challenge card from her tub, studied the directions and then began rummaging to find the exact right objects: six of the long blue pieces, four of the purple ones and nine orange balls. Her challenge was to construct a 3D cube, she explained.
“It’s hard because it keeps falling apart, so I just restart and try again,” said August.
Next to her, classmate Greyson Groendyk picked a tub full of LEGO pieces to build what he called “an undestructable house,” because “I thought that would be cool to do,” he said. His plan was to build the structure using all different sizes of LEGO to make it as “undestructable” as possible.
These activity tubs, plus Gorno’s small-group lesson on the rug, are part of a new approach to math instruction this year at West Elementary School. Called Math Workshop, the approach breaks math lessons into smaller, bite-size pieces to give students a variety of ways to learn and grasp math concepts.
“It’s more of a fast-paced (instruction) model; they’re not just sitting and doing a workbook for a whole 30-minute group lesson like math might have looked like in elementary schools using previous models,” Gorno said. “And it works well with a bigger group. I feel like it’s been really beneficial to their learning math this year.”
Math Workshop looks like this: During the hour of the day devoted to math instruction, students rotate through four different stations, where they get to complete a task or work on a lesson in 10- to 15-minute increments. Each stop incorporates either hands-on learning, a new lesson for the day, a review activity or a STEM activity.
“They’re in elementary (school), and they still need that movement and action to go along with learning,” Gorno said. “I feel like the switching every few minutes is really good for them, and the kids are on task for the whole time.”
At station one, kids practice their math facts fluency using a program called Reflex. The game-based system presents repetitive addition and subtraction tasks to ensure fluency in basic math skills; a student’s goal is to earn a green light that indicates mastery of the concepts.
Station two is a small-group gathering on the rug with Gorno for a new math lesson for the day. Using the enVision math curriculum, Gorno walks students through a guided practice and then gives time for some independent work in their workbooks as they strive to learn the new math concept.
Another station sees students tackling a review activity that reinforces a math skill they’ve already learned. The activity can be done on their iPads with math games, with a partner using flash cards, or by putting pencil to paper and working on computations.
At the final station, “quiet STEM,” kids get to build objects or work on challenges using the STEM activity tubs — it’s a station meant to offer a small “brain break” while still playing with mathematical concepts like spatial awareness, counting, patterns and more.
Besides the opportunity to learn math in bite-sized pieces, Gorno said the small-group aspect of learning math has been a benefit to her second-graders.
“When it’s their turn to come to the rug and work with me, it’s more one-on-one instruction and I can check in on them individually to see how they are doing, which is really nice,” she said. “And at the other stations, they work with each other really well. … Teamwork is big in here, and we try to rely on each other as much as we can.”
Since implementing Math Workshop at the beginning of the year, Gorno said math has quickly become one of her favorite parts of the day.
“It’s action-packed, and I think the kids all know their expectations really well to do their jobs at each station,” she said. “They want to do well and they want to get all their work done. I feel like every one of my kids in here is learning the whole time, which is kind of hard to do in second-grade math.”
Second-grader Avah Sheldon gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up in agreement with her teacher.
“I really like math because it’s fun,” said Avah as she worked to stack oddly shaped stones during her “quiet STEM” time. “We are working to get our green lights, and you can do math games to get that, so I really like doing that.”
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