4 Stations!?!

Happy Tuesday! :)

After half of a school year of math workshop, we decided that our students still struggle with basic facts.  Now that we have introduced multiplication and division, we wanted a fourth station for students to practice all four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. 

So--we spent our last professional work day creating a fourth station: Fact Practice.

After observing a math workshop at another school in the district and brainstorming how best to make this change, we came up with:

We changed our groups to colors: Red=Low, Yellow=Low-Medium, Green=High-Medium, Blue=High. (Groups still change weekly based on pre-assessments, of course) The colored groups make differentiating worksheets much easier. Groups pick the colored sheet or colored game pieces that match their group color.

The bottom part of the board shows how our rotation schedule works.  The dots show where each group starts.  Students rotate in a clockwise circle to the next station around the room.  The low group starts out at the teacher station, while the high group will come to the teacher station last.  The white board space allows for activities to be written in so that each student knows what task to complete.

We came up with the norms together, and the students refer to those norms to self-evaluate at the end of each math workshop.

<--Along with adding a fourth station, we also decided to add a Math Station Sheet (Thank you, to a math coach in our district!).  

This Math Station Sheet cuts down on copies and holds students accountable for the work completed at each station. 

At the start of math workshop, we display the teacher's copy of the sheet on the document camera (ELMO).  We fill in the titles for each station together.  Students also decide on the appropriate voice level for each station and write it in the boxes.

As students go to each station, they record information from that station.  For example, today at Fact Practice, students played Bingo Facts.  As they drew cards out of the basket, they recorded the answers on their Math Station Sheet under the Fact Practice station. 

To encourage us as teachers to always have a closure , we included it on the sheet as well. :)  The closure today in Chloe's class was: "I have 6 vertices, and all of my sides are equal in length.  What am I?" In Tabitha's class, students were told to write two attributes of a hexagon.

For the magic rectangle in the top-left corner, students rate their behavior according to the math workshop norms.  They write a 1-5 (1=many improvements needed, 5=keep it up!).

To keep grading simple, we assign a point for each box on the sheet=10 points (1 for the name!)