Math Workshop and Explore Time - Follow Up

Math Workshop ~ Follow Up
I thought that I should do just a bit more follow up on how a couple of things that I tried this year went. I wrote about wanting to change my math time into a math workshop time that would be similar to a reader's workshop or writer's workshop here. Then I followed that up with another post on how things were going here. Things have not changed too much since that last post. I did add one more day a week where I veered from the regular Everyday Math curriculum and went more in-depth on a topic or taught it in a different way.

The year ended up with my math block having three days of regular Everyday Math curriculum and content, one day of Math Exchanges and one day of Math Extensions. I am pretty happy with how this worked out. We still "covered" all of the Everyday Math curriculum for first grade but we added so much more - deeper thinking, collaboration on solving problems and looking at problems in various ways to solve them. At this point, I plan to follow the same format next year. We will start the year with Everyday Math curriculum every day and then about mid-year, we will begin to add in Math Exchanges and Math Extensions. I love how my students responded to the challenges of Math Exchanges and Math Extensions. We were all better mathematicians because of it.

Explore Time ~ Follow Up
Another big idea that I wanted to try this year was Explore Time. I wrote about that here. I did manage to have one Explore Time this year  and it went very well but after that, it was just too difficult to find the time. At my school we have so many wonderful "extras" that we do that our days are just packed. Some of these "extras" include Expeditionary Learning, drumming circles, portfolios, Adventure Education, overnight Voyages, All School Meetings, Morning Meetings, Closing Circles and much more. All of these are very valuable but they require a lot of time out of our day.

I know that we make time for the things that we value and I do value giving students choice so I am reworking my plan for Explore Time. I think that next year instead of having a block of time that is dedicated to exploring, I will add an explore center to our center times during the day. During my Readers's Workshop, we have a chunk of time during which we have centers. These are not traditional centers with pre-made activities for students to complete. My centers are a little like Daily 5 work stations where students have different ways to read, write and work with words. I also have a couple of math centers and centers related to our Expedition. I think I will add a new center or two next year. I might add a Wonder Center, an Explore Center and/or a Building Center. In this way, I can give students more time to explore and make choices but within the time frame that we already have set up.

Explore Time

Darn, darn, darn, darn*! I have yet another idea that I can't get out of my head and I think I need to try to make it fit somehow into my day. Darn! I have always (since my college days) wanted to have an Explore time in my classroom but I have always convinced myself that I could never make time for it or that it would be a management nightmare but after recently reading the blog posts below by Katie Keier and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, I really just can't let go of the idea. I forwarded the posts on to the kindergarten teachers at my school trying to tell myself that if they did this then the kids would have this experience and I would be off the hook but I still can't let it go. I was able to convince myself to let it go years ago when Debbie Miller wrote about it in her book Reading with Meaning by telling myself that there was just no time for it. Then Jennifer Orr posted her Encienda presentation from Educon on her blog and it was all about giving students meaningful choices. She has also written about the value of play several times on her blog. All of these posts along with my own beliefs are forcing me to think about when and how I can add more of this type of Explore time into our day at school. These posts, along with Jennifer's Encienda presentation, have inspired me:

Explore

Literacy Explore 

Math Explore-Investigate-Choice

Playing with the Big Kids

I am thinking that I could have an Explore time as the activity part of our morning meeting - maybe one or two days a week. Darn, I just figured out the "when" now I have to work on the "how".

 

* I say "darn" but I am actually really happy about all of this thinking that these wonderful educators have led me to do on this snow day off from school.