Students are Great Teachers!

We decided to start off the week in first grade with a new structure! This past Monday we learned the structure”One Stray.”  We started off with a word problem in math. It is important for first graders to know how to solve word problems. Word problems can be a challenge because you not only have to understand the math to solve, but you really have to determine what information is important  to take out of the problem.

Each group received a word problem. Together they glued this to their paper, read through the problem and began to brainstorm what they should do in their team.

 Once the problem was understood, each teammate had a job to do.

As each teammate completed his or her task, the math product really started to come together! They were able to ask for help within their group, and check each other’s work. Now, we were the experts of this math problem and we were ready to teach the rest of the class how to solve it. 

That’s where the new structure “One Stray” came in handy. We had students sitting in seat 3 get up and move to another table. Once they were there, the group that solved the math problem were the experts, or the teachers, and they taught that student the way that they solved the problem.

We did “One Stray” once again to insure that everyone had the chance to be part of the teacher group.

Explaining our thinking is something that we have worked on all year. The students had a blast being the teacher for a little while!