Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Playing with Words and Numbers

I got to teach 2nd grade today and enjoyed watching one of the Word Journey groups type the words into Wordle - http://www.wordle.net/ - and print them out. They loved it and enjoyed looking at those created by their classmates. Practicing spelling words can be fun.

Their feedback during my math lesson also gave me something to smile about. We were working on double digit addition. I love helping kids use what they know to figure out what they don't, so I used think-alouds to talk through the relationships between numbers. When I needed to add 7+6, I said that I know that 6+6=12, and 7 is one more than 6, so 7+6 must be one more than 12. Pretty soon I had the class talking through the problems with me. I felt good about the lesson and even better when one girl said, "I like the way you teach math", and several classmates agreed. Before becoming a teacher, I enjoyed playing with numbers on the job for 30 years. It is really exciting when I see kids enjoying playing with numbers too.

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