Math goals in the New Year!
Here are three goals elementary teachers can set with their students in math, regardless of the grade level:
Develop a Growth Mindset
Fostering a growth mindset in the classroom is essential to helping students view math as a skill they can develop, rather than a fixed talent like “people are born to be better in math”.
- Normalize Challenges and Effort
- Reinforce the idea that struggling with a problem is a sign of learning and growth, not failure. Model your own struggles.
- Provide problems that you don’t know the answer to and model your own persistence at solving.
- Praise Effort and Strategies, Not Just Correct Answers
- Instead of saying “You’re so smart” or “you got it right”, “you got it wrong” try, “you worked really hard on this problem, and your strategy was creative”
- Highlight the process students use to arrive at the answers, whether correct or incorrect.
- Celebrate Mistakes as Learning Opportunities
- Create a classroom culture where mistakes are openly discussed and valued as part of the learning process. “I like that solution; can you explain it?” “Does anyone have a different solution?” “Does anyone have a similar solution?”
- Use activities like “My Favorite Mistake”, where students share a mistake they made and what they learned from it.
Improving Number Sense in Math
Building a strong number sense is critical for developing confident and competent math learners. Number sense helps students understand numbers and their relationships, allowing them to approach problems flexibly and creatively. Here's how teachers can foster this essential skill:
- Estimation games
- Use real-world scenarios, like estimate the number of candies in the bag or the length of something in the room. Draw random numbers and have students estimate their totals
- Teach benchmarks for estimation or rounding to help with estimation
- Use Manipulatives and Visuals
- Play games like “What’s My Number”, where students ask yes/no questions to narrow down a number within a range.
- Use card games, dice and puzzles to make number exploration fun and engaging.
- Emphasize Relationships Between Numbers
- Explore how numbers connect, such as doubles (8+8=16), near doubles (8+9=17), or fact families (3+7=10, so 10-7=3).
- Show how addition and multiplication are related to subtraction and division.
Strengthen Problem-Solving skills through Collaboration & Communication
Problem-solving is at the heart of mathematics, and developing these skills is enhanced when students collaborate and communicate effectively. These strategies help students learn not only how to solve problems but also how to articulate their thinking, consider different perspectives, and build on others' ideas.
- Think-Pair-Share
- Present a problem and allow students to think independently, then discuss their ideas with a partner before sharing with the whole group.
- This method encourages both individual accountability and collaborative refinement of ideas.
- Math Centers or Stations
- Set up stations with different problem-solving tasks that require teamwork, such as puzzles, games, logic problems or real-world scenarios.
- Encourage students to discuss their strategies and agree on solutions. They can’t ask questions of teacher unless everyone agrees they have a question and what that question will be
- Team Challenges
- Use games like MANGO Math Add+ventures (coming soon) where teams must solve a series of problems to “unlock” clues and complete a challenge.
- Pose problems with multiple correct answers or approaches and have groups defend their solutions in a classroom debate.
