Monday, February 11, 2013

Teamwork or not

My kids are really struggling with working together. I posted about being frustrated a couple of weeks ago and got some great suggestions from my bloggy friends. Something I tried to do was to move my math time around and see if that helped any. They seemed so sleepy and out of it for math. So a few days a week we do math first thing in the morning. That seems to help some. I have a slight time constraint with doing math first thing because my ELL students leave for an hour at 9:10 or so. The other problem I had was the kids didn't seem to know how to work with a group. We work with partners a lot but we hadn't really worked that much in group of 3 or 4. So I decided to have them work with their math work stations partners and that seemed to help. But Tuesday we were starting our math lesson. We had already done the promethean board that introduces the activity and concept for the day. I had them go back to their seats with their partners and then they were suppose to work on building numbers with their partner. Everything fell apart at this time. I had 2 pairs that were getting they were suppose to work together. The rest of them were working on their own to build the number and finding they didn't have enough cubes. So we stopped the lesson. I took up the cubes and tried to work on working as a team rather than math. I told the kids they were going to draw a picture with their partner. They needed to talk about it and decide together what they were going to draw. Then they had choose the material they were going to use to make the picture. I wouldn't give them what they needed until they agreed. They then had to work on drawing the picture together. This took most of our morning. But I think they finally got that when I wanted them to work together or with a partner that they needed to talk and they needed to both have a part. Here are a couple of pictures of the kids working together:


Not only did the kids learn a lesson, but I did too. I need to remember to take the time to work on things like team building with the kids. So I'm asking you guys to help me come up with some other activities for team building. What do you do to help your students learn to work together? I would love to hear about it.

1 comment:

  1. I know what you mean, some of my kiddos have a hard time working together as well!

    Angela

    The Daily Alphabet

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