At least four different strategies were modeled as the children told their peers how they worked on these tasks. The strategies came from the children not from the teacher. While telling children about these different addition strategies may be faster, in the end it is not as meaningful for the children or as successful. Allowing children to develop the strategies as if they were their own fosters a real sense of independence, ownership, and empowerment. Eventually, as different strategies are used repeatedly and are discussed in our group sessions, we label the strategies by formal names.
Some children progress at different rates than others.
Allowing children to learn at their own pace is a real challenge for teachers. The pressures of time and expectation of immediate results place heavy demands on teachers to move children through an expansive and overwhelming curriculum. A teacher must trust that his students want to learn and that they have the capacity to do so even if their pace is different from his. Jr. Our conversation centered around how groups of seeds and oranges could be combined together. Then, the children decided to make flip books about number combinations.