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Classroom Close Up
An Interview with Eric Litwin
conducted by
Young Fans of Eric
I started adding music and movement to engage children, then they started to read and comprehend
The other productive skill is speaking. Promoting fluent, accurate math conversation skills is a necessity for the triumph and empowerment of our math students. Speaking in math class can be used to assess comprehension. Prior to speaking in class, it is paramount to allow students to have think time or a brainstorming session (Routman, 2018). Following this period, allow students to talk in small groups, to present a presentation, talk in a whole group repeating activity, or talk in role-playing activities. After these speaking activities, a math teacher would provide feedback to the students. A routine and/or learning opportunity that would lead to rich math conversations are Number Talks. To present a Number Talk, educators will present a concrete math model and provide students with think time. During this think time, students will be reasoning about math and making sense of numbers and concepts. Teachers will facilitate a math conversation following this think time. They will encourage students to talk about their reasoning they have presented. Students will verbalize their conceptual understanding of mathematical concepts (Hughes, 2018). There are a plethora of other math routines educators could use to spark math conversations.
Doing what is best for students in math class means teachers empower learners through the language domains to be successful and passionate learners. Incorporating the language domains into math class will bring enjoyment and interest into math for students who otherwise did not have this enjoyment before. The language domains will bring about achievement and success for our students in math.
References
Hughes, N. (2018). Classroom-Ready number talks for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers: 1,000 interactive math activities that promote conceptual and computational fluency. Ulysses Press
Mihai, F. M., & Purmensky, K. (2016). Course design for TESOL: A guide to integrating curriculum and teaching. University of Michigan Press.
Minnery, A. & Smith, A. T. (2018). Close sentence reading to foster decoding and comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 71(6), 743-748.
https://doi:10.1002/trtr.1680
Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2019). Mathematics.
https://dese.mo.gov/college-career-readiness/curriculum/mathematics#mini-panel-math1
Routman, R. (2018). Literacy essentials: Engagement, excellence, and equality for all learners. Stenhouse Publishers.
Vacca, R. T., Vacca, J. L., & Mraz, M. (2017). Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum (12th ed. ). Pearson Education, Inc.
Vaughn, S. R., Bos, C. S., & Schumm, J. S. (2018). Teaching students who are exceptional, diverse, and at risk in the general education classroom (7th ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.
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