Math Monday: ONE Question To Ask Your Kids When They Ask For Help

Whether your school-aged "kids" are your biological/adopted children or the students in your classroom, there's a good chance that they've asked you for help with a math problem. It's easy to give them the correct answer or help them figure out the first step, but doing so helps our kids become dependent upon us.

Every school year, I choose a new math mantra to practice with my kids. This year, I've chosen to focus on "PERSEVERANCE" for math. The new Common Core Standards have 8 mathematical practice standards that all students will master as they work through content. Here are a few that correspond to perseverance:

MP.1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
MP.3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
MP.4: Model with mathematics.
MP.5: Use appropriate tools strategically.

Before students can solve a problem, they need to UNDERSTAND what that problem is asking them to do. In multi-step problems, some students read the problem once and then ask for help because they don't immediately see the arithmetic that is needed to solve the problem. Today's students are used to Googling questions, asking Siri, or texting friends if they get stuck. It's important for us to teach them HOW to work through problems that aren't easily solved. Students must be able to understand the problem, solve it, defend their steps/reasoning, and use that understanding to critique others. Students should be able to use models (tallies, pictures, diagrams, tables, etc) to help them explain their reasoning, and become more efficient when using these tools to solve problems.

With all of that being said, here are the 6 steps I am using this year to help my kids persevere through difficult math problems:

1. Have a positive attitude.

Having a positive attitude is a necessity. Many students that have not built up math stamina have a hard time entering a difficult task with a positive attitude. Help them by having them repeat positive affirmations, such as ,"I will try my best," "I can learn anything," "I'm making the decision to try," "I can do it," and "I believe in myself."

2. Read the problem, write an answer sentence, and read the problem again.

Have the student read the problem aloud. Ask them to locate the sentence that asks for an answer OR the sentence that asks a question. Using that sentence, write a sentence farm that answers the question, and use a line where the answer will go. For example, the last sentence of a word problem that asks, "How many flowers does Sophia have?" would turn into a sentence frame that says, "Sophia has __ flowers." Some students don't complete all of the steps for completing a multi-step problem, so writing this frame helps them figure out whether or not they are done solving the problem.

3. Underline/circle important information.

Help students read through the problem to look for information that helps fill in the answer frame. Students might circle numbers and key words, such as "altogether" or "how many more." Use the key words to help students figure out WHAT to do WITH the numbers. 

4. Try different strategies.

Students build mental toolboxes of strategies in school that they can use to solve problems, such as drawing a picture, using tallies, making a diagram, using manipulatives, and making tables. Encourage your kids to try different strategies if the one they're using isn't helpful.

5. Ask for help.

Some students skip step 1, complete part of step 2, and then jump straight to step 5. The BEST thing that you can do to is ask your kids the following question:

"What have you tried so far?"

It sounds simple, but it serves 3 purposes. First, it helps you see whether or not your student has worked through any strategies on their own. If they have, they should be able to tell you what they were. Make sure you praise them for any work already attempted on their own, especially for students with low math confidence. If they haven't, it will remind them that they need to go back and try some strategies on their own. Second, it helps students explain their work so far. Sometimes, explaining their work helps them redirect their own thinking. Third, it helps you understand where they got stuck. They may have copied down a problem wrong, used a strategy that isn't appropriate for the problem, or computed the wrong arithmetic.

6. Fill in your answer frame and check to see if it's reasonable.

It's so important to check answers for reasonableness. If a problem is asking for the difference between 2 numbers, the students should not end up with a number greater than the largest number in the problem.

Our kids will all be challenged with difficult problems this year, so make sure you encourage them to work through these problems. Be sure to ask them what they've already tried before offering any assistance to help them build up their math stamina.

Happy problem solving!

A Behind-the-Scenes Look At A Reading Workshop

We have been having so much fun in our Bookworms reading workshop this month! The workshop focuses on 5 areas of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, sight words, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Let's take a look at a few of the activities we've done.

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes-in spoken words. Essentially, it's being able to listen and distinguish sounds from one another. For example, the work "tick" has 3 phonemes (sounds): /t/ /i/ and /k/. The final sound, /k/, is spelled with two letters, but those letters make one sound together. Before children learn to read and spell, they must develop these listening skills. 

One of our phonemic awareness activities was identifying the place in which we hear a particular sound in a word. If I asked you to identify where you heard the /i/ sound in the word "tick", you should be able to tell me that you hear it in the middle of the word. I read off a series of words, and our students had to use cards to tell me whether they heard the sound in the beginning, middle, or end of the word. This is a really easy activity to do at home, so they got to take their cards home to practice even more.

Phonics

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing by developing phonemic awareness in order to teach the correspondence between those sounds and the spelling patterns that represent them. For example, the /k/ sound you hear in the word "tick" is spelled with 2 letters, c and k. The /k/ sound can also be spelled with just a /c/ or just a /k/. While phonemic awareness uses ONLY sounds, phonics uses written words. 

Many young readers look at the first letter of a word and then spit out a word that starts with that letter. Sometimes the word makes sense, and other times it doesn't. It's important to slow down and blend each sound together. We use these linking cubes to practice reading through the whole word, identifying words that rhyme, and see that the words rhyme because they end with the same sounds. They sure do love these cubes!

Sight Words

Sight words are words that young readers memorize rather than decode (sound out). Many of these do not follow the rules of phonics, and therefore cannot be sounded out correctly. Instead, we teach children a few of these words at a time. Most of these words occur in beginning text frequently, so they are worth memorizing. 

One of our favorite games involves a popcorn tub filled with popsicle sticks. Each stick has two words written on it, and students take turns pulling one stick out at a time. If the stick is green and they can read both words, they get to keep it. If they cannot read it, I help them out a bit and then it goes back in the tub. If it's red, they have to give the stick to the next student and put all of their sticks back in the tub. We play this for 5-7 every week, and they LOVE it!

Another game they like to play is called "slap". I put some sight words face up on the table. I call out a word, and the first student to find it and slap it gets to keep it. They love this one also. I'm afraid to see how excited they would get if I let them use fly swatters.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency is what bridges word recognition and reading comprehension. In other words, it's what helps us make sense of what we are reading. If you read too slow, your brain has a hard time understanding what it's reading because it's working so hard to actually read it. Young readers tend to sound like robots when they read because they read one word, and then another word, and another word, and so on. A fluent reader is able to reads a series of words as a phrase and gain meaning from what they read. 

One of the fluency activities we did for this workshop focused on punctuation. The students read words with punctuation marks to practice taking pauses and reading with inflections. They were able to take home punctuation posters to help them practice at home. One of our young readers has improved so much now that he's paying attention to punctuation.

Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning. There are many strategies that you use while reading that you probably don't even realize you use. While we read, our brains are busy making inferences, connecting ideas in the text to our own experiences, creating a series of events, and discerning between main ideas and details (just to name a few). In each session of the workshop, we focus on a different strategy. 

In the first chapter of Frog and Friends by Eve Bunting, we had to make inferences from the clues that the author wrote to figure out that "the THING" in the story was just an orange balloon. It was funny for our readers to feel like they had insider knowledge that the characters in the story didn't have. We identified where in the story we found the clues, and we talked about how using text evidence is super important. We practice each strategy with a short passage, and then we apply that strategy to our book for the week. The BEST part is that the students get to take the books home with them!

*A note on the books used in this workshop*: The I Am A Reader! series is absolutely amazing! Even Bunting, for example, is one of the authors in this series, and she's tremendously accomplished. These readers go BEYOND leveled texts. They are clever and funny, and if you have a reluctant young reader at home, I can't recommend these enough. For you educators, the back of each book features the corresponding grade level, guided reading level, RR level, ATOS reading level, Lexile measure, and word count. AMAZING! Parents, you can simply look at the grade level and get a good indication of whether or not it's an appropriate book for your reader. If they can read all but 5 of the words (or less) on the first page, take it home with you. 

The Amazing Machines series by Tony Mitton is also fantastic! The non-fiction books are fun and easy reads, and they have great information in them for curious, young minds.

Next week, we will be reading a book from the Mini Mechanics series that comes with STICKERS INSIDE! There are activity pages throughout the book, and the students use the stickers to go back and locate information. Genius, right?! I know. How come I didn't think of that?

This workshop ends next week, but we will start up a new one in September. We sure hope you'll join us! 

Summer Reading GIVEAWAY!

Summer is right around the corner, and we know that parents are actively searching for camps and activities to help prevent the "sumer slide" from affecting a year's worth of hard work. Before we reveal the goodies in our Sumer Reading GIVEAWAY that one of our lucky Instagram and Facebook followers will receive, we'd like to talk a little bit more about the summer slide and how you can prevent it.

What is the summer slide?
The summer slide is a term used to describe the backtracking that happens when students do not read over the summer. Did you know that students can lose 2 months worth of reading performance if they don't actively engage with text over the summer? That means that your student could be 2 1/2 years behind their peers by the time they enter middle school.

Hasn't my child spent enough time reading at school?
NO! Did you know that, on average, children spend 7,800 hours at home and 900 hours at school annually? You have a lot of influence over your children's interest in reading. When students enter kindergarten, close to 100% of them are interested in reading a book outside of school. By 4th grade that drops to 54%, by 8th grade that drops to 30%, and by 12th grade it drops to 19%.  What causes that drop? Many experts believe it's caused by a drop in parents reading to and with their kids.

What's the difference between reading for 20 minutes a day and reading for 5 minutes a day?
A student that reads for 20 minutes a day reads 3,600 minutes per school year, which amounts to 1,800,000 words per year. These students tend to score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests. A student that reads for 5 minutes a day reads 900 minutes per school year, which amounts to 282,000 words per year. These students tend to score in the 50th percentile on standardized tests. Sadly, a student that reads for 1 minute a day reads 180 minutes per school year, which amounts to only 8,000 words per year. These students tend to score in the 10th percentile on standardized tests. Those little bits of minutes add up, so find a way to make it part of your routine.

How do I choose a book for my child?
There's a 5-finger rule that teachers use in the classroom. Open a book to any page and ask your child to read it aloud. For every word that they don't know, put up a finger (somewhere where they can't see it). If you put up 5 fingers for one page, the book is too difficult for your child, and they should select another book.

How can I read with my beginning reader?
Here are a list of strategies that you can use:

• Encourage your child to use their finger to track the words they are reading.
• Read a sentence and have your child repeat it.
• Take turns reading sentences or pages.
• Make predictions about the story and read to find out if you're correct.
• Read your favorite books over and over again! Repeated reading helps build fluency and reading intonation.

What can I do to help prevent the summer slide?
There are so many things that you can do to make sure your students are engaging in text this summer. Here are a few ideas:

• Find interactive books and games on your iPad that address reading and/or phonics.
• Show your children all of the things that you read in your daily life. This might include recipes, directions, assembly instructions, or mail. 
• Read to your child and let them hear the rhythm of words and exaggeration and expression in your voice!
• Play games! Some games, such as Apples to Apples, encourage reading and are really fun to play. Slap some sight words onto Jenga blocks and read a block every time you draw one.
• Set a good example by letting your children see YOU reading. Send a message that reading is valuable and important.
• Visit your local library! Libraries are a great place to explore, and many local libraries, such as those here in Long Beach, offer summer reading incentives. 
• Leave books for your child in the three best places, also knows as the three Bs: bed, bathroom, breakfast table.

What are some websites with FREE resources?

• starfall.com
• speakaboos.com
• spellingcity.com
• wegivebooks.org
• interactives.weebly.com

What is this GIVEAWAY all about?!

Alright, let's talk about this giveaway. Having something tangible helps our tactile learners and also serves as a reminder to read. Our giveaway features the following items:

1. $10 Target gift card to be used to pick out a fun new book!

2. Retell stick: This is a stick that has one side for fiction text and one side for non-fiction text. For fiction text, students place buttons on the stick, one by one, as they tell you the characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end of the story. For non-fiction text, they place buttons on the stick as they tell you the main idea and three supporting details.

3. Reading scavenger hunt: This is a treasure map that students follow as they complete reading tasks, such as reading a book that's been made into a movie, that takes place in your favorite city, etc. How fun is that?!

4. Response sticks: These are two sets of color-coded sticks that have comprehension questions on them. The blue sticks are for non-fiction (blue = true, get it?), and include questions such as, "What was the main idea of what you read, and what were the supporting details?" The yellow sticks are for fiction, and include questions such as, "If you were interviewing the main character, what questions would you ask?" This set also includes a dice, numbered 1-6, that can be rolled to determine how many sticks your child must draw and answer that day. Throw these in a small bucket or box by their books and keep it easy!

These are items we've used in the past, and we're so excited to offer them to you in this giveaway to keep your kids reading this summer! The giveaway runs from Friday, May 22, 2015 at 8:00am PST to Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 9:00pm PST. One winner will be announced on our Instagram page within 24 hours.

To enter: 

1. Follow me on Instagram @kidsunderconstruction

2. Tag a friend on my Instagram post in the comments

3. Like our Facebook page 

4. For an extra entry, share the link to this post on your Facebook page

Good luck and happy reading!

Fall Workshops: Fine Motor Fun

Research shows that fine motor skills are linked to success in writing and academics. I just HAVE to share some of the super fun activities that we we used for our fine motor workshop last fall. They are geared towards students in Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, but the activities are so fun that even I had fun! This post contains affiliate links; read more about them at the bottom of this post!

One of my friends from my undergraduate days, Christie Kiley, is a pediatric occupational therapist and has a blog with many wonderful ideas! I help contribute to one of her fine motor boards on Pinterest, and this workshop encourages many fine motor skills that she explains on her blog. Here's a snippet:

Pincer grasp: Pinching with thumb and index finger. 

Finger isolation: Activating a single finger on command (such as the index finger for pointing and pushing). 

Thumb opposition: Coordinating the thumb with the other fingers to help with holding, squeezing, and strengthening the space between thumb and index finger (known as the “web space”).

Tripod grasp: Pinching with thumb and index finger while resting the object on the middle finger, much like you’d hold a pencil. 

Hand-eye coordination: Coordinating hand movements based on what the eyes are seeing. Also known as visual-motor integration. 

Bilateral coordination: Coordinating the use of two hands to accomplish a task, such as stabilizing an object with one hand while working with the other. 

Midline integration: Being able to come to and cross over the invisible line that separates the left and right sides of the body. This contributes to the development of hand dominance. If your child struggles with this, encourage midline crossing by placing desired items on the side opposite the hand they are using so they have to reach across their body. 

Here are some sample activities that we did together:

Students dug up sight words and then wrote them in the sandbox. Each student went home with a set to use at home since we live so close to the beach. Use non-toxic play sand to keep it safe for little ones. 

This activity helps strengthen those little muscles that support the pincer grasp. Make sure you use washable paint so that you can easily wipe the paint off of desks/tables/little hands.

These sensory bags are great for all students, but especially for those with sensory processing difficulties. We practiced prewriting skills and letter formation with these bags. You can use this non-toxic orange hair gel for a bright and fun pop of color.

This activity is great for practicing that tripod grasp that helps with writing. Students practiced making patterns, letters, numbers, and pictures. You can use an old bulletin board at home, or use these cork tiles to set up a rotation station. I'm loving these push pins to make it extra fun. What kid doesn't love decorative office supplies?!

Here's a three-for-one activity that practices letter recognition, spelling, AND fine motor all at once. These bright and colorful, wooden clothespins are great for adding visual stimulation.

This is another pencil grasp activity that helps students hold onto pencils correctly. If you have a clothespin handy, try this one out at home.

What kid doesn't love Play Dough and Legos?! Students practiced forming letters and numbers, and also created pictures using the Lego pieces. You can grab a 36-pack of Play Doh and either let everyone keep a canister in their desk or have enough on hand so that you can divvy them up into your centers boxes/storage. If your home isn't littered with these little sharp corners of death all over the floor, you can grab this Lego starter kit or ask students in class if they have any extras at home that they'd like to donate.

This is great practice for manipulating small objects. These yellow and white golf tees are easy to spot if they fall onto the floor (or into your carpet). How cute are these glass marbles?!

This is a great competitive activity that encourages muscle control and coordination. Students are given one minute to grab as many as they can, and then we count and graph how many marshmallows each student grabbed. We love to incorporate math concepts when we can! Grab 40 pairs of chopsticks and set some aside for other centers.

This activity is great for correcting students that hold writing materials inefficiently AND for students that need to strengthen their hand muscles. We used a variety of materials to keep this one fun. If you can't find these at the Dollar Tree, you can order a set of pom pom balls for less than a latte AND use the leftovers for warm fuzzies (hot glue a pair of goggly eyes to the pom pom balls and give them to students when they say things to you or other students that make your heart feel warm and fuzzy)!

Our fine motor fun workshop began with a station rotation in which each student got to practice a series of skills on their own. One of the stations was one-on-one with the instructor. This allowed us to monitor and help each student in the workshop.

We hope you can replicate some fine motor fun with your students!

AFFILIATE LINKS: This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission if you make a purchase using this link. I purchased all of the items myself, and all of the opinions expressed here are my own.

Fall Workshops: Bookworms 3-5

Our bookworms workshop for grades 3-5 focuses on three of the reading strategies that our older elementary students struggle with the most: differentiating between main ideas and details, analyzing cause and effect relationships, and citing evidence to support text-dependent comprehension questions. Here's a sneak peek at some of the activities we will be doing in this workshop.

Main Idea and Details 

A student must be able to identify the main idea of a story before they can fully understand a story in its entirety. This is easier said than done with some of the longer pieces of text that students read in class. We will start our session on main idea and details by examining a few short paragraphs. Students will read them, and decipher between the main idea (what the story is mostly about) and the details (which sentences add more information about the main idea). Students will then be given an envelope containing detailed sentences. They will have a chance to practice putting the sentences together to write a main idea sentence that addresses ALL of the details. As a group, we will look closely at a longer piece of text, and color-code the sentences to reveal the main ideas and details of each paragraph. Students will take home two more passages to practice with on their own, which will be reviewed during our second session.  

Source: All The Dots

Cause and Effect
A large majority of the comprehension questions that our students are asked can be answered using the cause and effect relationships between events in a story. The choices that characters make in a story have consequences, that those consequences often have chains of events that follow. In non-fiction text, many historical events and scientific processes are explained as a series of cause and effect events. In this workshop, we use Thinking Maps to identify the causes and effects of events in our texts.

Source: The Applicious Teacher

Text-Dependent Questions
One of the major shifts in the Common Core State Standards is asking text-dependent comprehension questions. Let me explain what that means in English. Remember when you were in first grade, and your teacher read the story a class about a kid that got a new puppy? Remember how eeeeeeveryone wanted to tell their stories about when THEY got a puppy? That's called making a text-to-self connection. The story might have been followed up by a writing task that either asked you to write about a time that you got a pet, an animal that you'd like to have as a pet, or how you would have reacted if you got home and there was a puppy waiting for you on the front doorstep. You could easily receive full credit for a written response that had absolutely nothing to do with the story. Is it important for children to make these kinds of connections? Absolutely! Does telling about your own pet have anything to do with your understanding of the story? Although it's loosely connected, no. A text-dependent question might ask how Billy felt about getting the puppy, and ask you to cite evidence to support your answer. That's fancy classroom talk for "point to the place in the story where you found that information." Many of our upper elementary students are struggling to do this because they've never been asked to do it before. At best, they worked on it last year, and they certainly need more practice with it this year.

In this workshop, we will spend two weeks learning to understand the question, coming up with an answer, looking back in the text to support or refute that answer, and then explaining how that text helps us prove our answer.

Source: Luckey Frog's Lilypad

Source: Brooke Brown

Source: Create Teach Share

Source: I'm Lovin' Lit

Practicing these three skills will help your students meet and exceed their mid year reading benchmarks. We hope that if this workshop doesn't meet your needs, that you'll share it with a friend that might have students in need of this kind of practice.

Happy reading!

Free Download: PDF list of 25 (plus 9 bonus) items we take whentutoring students

Our most popular post to date is our post about all of the supplies that we tutors and educators schlep around with us. You can read it here. It's a sneak peek into my bag that I take to work that's full of all of the items I've ever wished I had on me while at work.

Here's a FREEBIE for you on this delightful Monday: a PDF list of the all of these items, plus 9 BONUS items that I added.

Happy educating!