On January 26th, the Center for Children's Learning and the Opal Advisory Council hosted a family math night, focused on mathematics instruction K-5.
We began with some history of the mathematics curriculum used at Opal School. After several years of being somewhat discontented with the match between available math curricula and Opal's foundational beliefs about teaching and learning, we were introduced to a series called Young Mathematicians at Work, by Catherine Twomey Fosnot and Maarten Dolk. Finally there was a source that was based on the assumption that doing a lot of math was a fundamentally different thing than learning to think like a mathematician. And Opal School teachers found the support they'd been looking for. Many staff members, including Marcy Berkowitz, Mary Gage Davis, and Kimie Fukuda, spent a week during the summer to attend a training with Catherine Fosnot, and the theory and methods found their way into the Opal School classrooms.
Mary Gage Davis and Steve Davee have put together some video of the components of what we now call math workshop. (You can read more about math at Opal School by clicking here.) Over the next several days, I'll post each section of the video so that those of you who were not able to be at the meeting will have a little window into what you missed.
The first segment is an example of what we call a "mini-lesson". The focus of the mini-lesson, or what is often referred to as a "number string" is for children to practice calculation, mental problem solving, and to be encouraged to discover patterns and relationships between numbers and operations. In this segment, you'll see older Opal School students thinking together about the relationships between multiplication and division, and working with the model of an open array to make this relationship meaningful and visible.
Click link below to play video:
Download Math Mini Lesson MG Final 1.26.11 Web-desktop.m4v (72323.3K)
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