Why is my kid on the floor?!

Our focus for math instruction is for kids to experience it. We give students a guiding question and then have them attack it. In today's example they are asked to 'sort the triangles according to their measure'. It's up to them to decide how to do that. Something very interesting happens with these Open type questions, there is really no right or wrong answer!! They are free to explore and decide for themselves what they want to focus on. Something very special happens--any child, regardless of math 'smarts' can contribute. We use their work later to showcase specific strategies that kids developed to address the question. The variety and scope of their answers and strategies is enlightening. Once this stage is done we move onto consolidation--stayed tuned. We will discuss this stage tomorrow.