Wednesday, October 27, 10:10 A.M. Sixth Age Math Class. Class #18 on my “50 Classes or Bust!” trek. On a rainy, unusually warm Wednesday morning, I am here in Mrs. Miles’s colorful, vibrant classroom. I arrive just as class is starting, slightly out of breath after hustling up from the girls’ gym, where the Pilot Class students taught me how to do the “Chicken Dance”! (Fortunately, no photos were taken!). Mrs. Miles always has a variety of ways to teach and “reach” her students, whether the class is math, reading, or discovery. Mrs. Miles is using an overhead projector to show images of small leaves and pumpkins. She shows the images and then quickly covers them up, in an effort to help students learn what numbers “look like.” In other words, she wants her pupils to be able to see a group of five leaves and immediately recognize that there are five leaves rather than counting the leaves one at time to determine that there are five. I have never seen this teaching technique before, but it makes great sense and the students enjoy the competitive nature of the activity. The students then get unifix cubes (basically like Legos) and return to their spots on the rug. Mrs. Miles reads aloud
Five Spooky Ghosts Playing Tricks at School, and the students follow along and build various stacks of cubes, in accordance with the storyline. By the end, the students have a pattern of cubes, as shown in this picture.
Students then look around the room and identify places where numbers are “in order.” The boys and girls find the clock and calendar, among other examples. Quickly, the class is on to its next activity. Mrs. Miles distributes ghost cut-outs, with a number on them (0 through 5). The students have to get themselves in order and stand in front of class. Mrs. Miles then removes a student and the class needs to figure out which number is missing. The students enjoy this game and the kinesthetic movement involved. For the fourth and final activity, the class members work individually at their seats, coloring and writing numbers, with Mrs. Miles actively circulating among the students to check their work and assist and encourage as needed. At one point, a boy says, “Mrs. Miles, I forget how to write a 2.” She replies in a song-like way, “Around the tree and back to you, that is how we make a 2.” The child then wrote his 2, and a classmate exclaimed, “That is really good!” To Mrs. Miles and her hard-working students, I enthusiastically share the same message: “Your class was really good!”
