Kindergartners are telling me their brains are stretching! To help them further develop their critical, logical, and metacognitive skills we’ve worked with discovering patterns in math exemplars about ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd…) to logically and creatively thinking about how a grouping of dots might represent a simple idea to deductive reasoning.
For one of our favorite lessons students used their deductive reasoning skills as I read clues aloud. The clues helped them determine the order of a series of different colored Christmas presents. Some clues were easier and told the students where to place a particular present and others were much tougher and simply said where the present was not. Many of the lessons start with a book and this one was, Santa Cows by Cooper Edens.
After hearing the charming book, The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, students exercised their logical thinking skills to match given statements to pictures of dots. Salt shaker, marching band, and missing button are three of the nine examples.
We looked at creative thinking skills as students drew dots to represent various words. One child drew two dots and put a wiggly line over one and under another to get across the idea of sinks and floats. Another indicated the idea of “even” with two white dots and two black dots and explaining that 2 and 4 are even numbers.
Each lesson incorporates metacognitive thinking as well. Simply put, it means understanding one’s thinking and learning - ways one learns best or struggles, areas of strengths and weaknesses, etc. We often ask students to explain what was easy or hard for them during this lesson and why, how they figured something out, or how they feel about their work or the topics we are discussing.
For one of our favorite lessons students used their deductive reasoning skills as I read clues aloud. The clues helped them determine the order of a series of different colored Christmas presents. Some clues were easier and told the students where to place a particular present and others were much tougher and simply said where the present was not. Many of the lessons start with a book and this one was, Santa Cows by Cooper Edens.
After hearing the charming book, The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds, students exercised their logical thinking skills to match given statements to pictures of dots. Salt shaker, marching band, and missing button are three of the nine examples.
We looked at creative thinking skills as students drew dots to represent various words. One child drew two dots and put a wiggly line over one and under another to get across the idea of sinks and floats. Another indicated the idea of “even” with two white dots and two black dots and explaining that 2 and 4 are even numbers.
Each lesson incorporates metacognitive thinking as well. Simply put, it means understanding one’s thinking and learning - ways one learns best or struggles, areas of strengths and weaknesses, etc. We often ask students to explain what was easy or hard for them during this lesson and why, how they figured something out, or how they feel about their work or the topics we are discussing.