Sunday, September 7, 2014

Counting Circles

In class we have been doing these exercises called counting circles. Everyone in the class stands in a circle and the teacher gives a starting number and then the amount that it will change by as it is passed around the circle. The first time was a bit scary because I was afraid that I would get the answer wrong or that I would take way too long to figure out the answer. As the exercise progressed those anxieties eased up, and I realized that some people were fast and some were not. After we got all the way around the circle plus maybe a few more people going twice, the teacher picked a person down the line from where we stopped and asked the class to figure out what that person's response would be for the problem. Once we all had answers, shown by a thumbs up, we were asked to share the answer and how we came up with our answer. Multiple people shared out their answers and how they got to their answer. What I like a lot about this exercise is you are practicing mental math and at the end you see that there are many ways to get to the same answer. It is also a good way for you to realize that you made a mistake. When I shared my results and I explained what I did, I had made an error with my mental math, but I saw were I went wrong as I was talking through my process. I believe that this would be a great exercise for students to do at the beginning of class as a warm-up. I will be using this in my classroom and I my even try to figure out a way to tie it in to my band classes...Rhythm Circles! That could be fun!

1 comment:

  1. Love the idea of rhythm circles. If you want to try it out on us, I'm okay with that.

    clear: paragraph structure would help.
    coherent: what would you say your main point is here?
    complete: to be an exemplar, you want a post to show 1-2 hours of work. You could expand this with a recount of a counting circle, or imagining ways to use them, or get into the number talk aspect, or read up on Sadie's counting circle info and share it, or...
    content: that would hit more at content you're touching on which is a good choice.
    consolidated: with that other stuff, add an end for consolidation. Summary, synthesis, questions for moving forward, etc.

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