2nd grade math observation

Last week I watched a 2nd grade math class that effectively provided entry points to the content through multiple modalities, and that combined teacher creativity with the TERC: Investigations curriculum that forms the core of our K-5 math program. The students began by standing in a circle. In response to teacher instruction, they then used body rhythm - drumming on their own bodies - to make up patterns, starting with a clap of the hands and then a pat of each hand against their shoulder blades. After repeating this several times, they moved on to a second rhythm - a clap of the hands, a pat of each hand against their shoulder blades, and slap of each hand against their waist. They continued in this vein, developing more and more complicated patterns. The students then all sat, and came up with semantic descriptions of the patterns they had made - "clap pat pat," "clap pat pat slap slap", "clap pat pat slap slap snap snap," and so on. The third step was to translate these word patterns into alphabetic patterns - ABB, ABBCC, ABBCCDD, etc. Finally, still working in the group, they turned these alphabetic patterns into snap-cube patterns, by building chains of different colored cubes in repeating patterns.

In the second half of the class the students moved to the tables for individual work, coloring in unique patterns on handouts. Some students used the alphabetic strategy to create the patterns which they then colored, others built snap-cube chains which they then copied, and others jumped straight to mentally creating patterns and coloring the squares on the page. Pattern making and skip-counting are key ideas that underlie the development of number sense about the operations of multiplication, and each child used a strategy that was effective for him-or-herself, that fit into the child's developmental schema, and that s/he knew would allow him/her to be successful - the very design of the TERC: Investigations curriculum. It was really fun to watch, and to see the students then using those patterns to answer predictive questions ("what will be the color of the 30th block of this pattern?").