Give a big welcome to Casey from Grow and Enjoy, who is guest blogging today about Fun Ideas For Engaging Guided Math Ideas In The Classroom!
Hello everyone and a big thank you to Abigail for having me as a guest blogger today! I am a second year kindergarten teacher and a small fish blogger at Grow and Enjoy.
As teachers we hear a lot about the importance of guided reading groups. I agree that they are very important, but I also think guided math groups can be just as beneficial. Today I am going to share some easy ways to make guided math groups engaging and effective for your students.
Guided Math Groups
Give Kids A Choice
Students will automatically be more engaged if you make the lesson directly relevant to their life. In the lesson above, students were practicing their measuring skills by pretending to be zookeepers. This corresponded with our zoo field trip. We discussed the job of a zookeeper and the importance of keeping measurement records of the animals.
Each student was given the opportunity to choose an animal (my old Beanie Baby collection from my parent’s garage), draw its picture, and measure it using the ruler. You can get this recording sheet for free through Grow and Enjoy on TPT. The students loved this activity!
Make Lessons Relevant To Kids
Being from Kentucky, basketball is also very relevant to my students. We also did a measuring activity where we compared our heights to those of University of Kentucky basketball players.
Switch up the manipulatives.
Don’t always use counting bears. We switch up the materials we use weekly. One of their favorite manipulatives is food!
We have a special recipe for Halloween and the 100th day that requires students to count out ingredients. We also use food for graphing, such as conversation hearts for Valentine’s Day or Lucky Charms for St. Patrick’s Day.
Play dough is also a big favorite! Here we are using it to build teen numbers on ten frames.
For this lesson, I literally laid in the floor while the students measured me with linking cubes. They had a blast!
I hope these lessons give you some Engaging Guided Math Ideas for making your guided math groups more fun!
Make sure students are doing the work.
Don’t give your students all of the answers. Give them the opportunity to struggle and come up with their own strategies and answers. Your students should be actively thinking and representing their thinking. Also, let them see you having fun doing math!
Make sure you check out my blog for more ideas!
Food is always a fun thing to measure. I love that you had the kids measure you. That is really creative!
Thank you for the chance to guest blog Abigail! I am enjoying reading the other guest blog posts as well!