Reply To: Mary's Progress Log

[Mary Manske]

FYI, I teach a daily double period, so I’m working with almost two hours. Hence the large quantity of routines/resources I want to incorporate–my class is always packed and I run out of time but I think I can/should prioritize differently. 

Last year I started every period with a Do Now (usually relating to that day’s topic), Mental Math (a worksheet based version I am no longer doing) and then Estimation 180(whole protocol involving recording, graphs and summarizing data). 

The Mental Math I have a good bank of *actual* things for–largely whole group focusing on a strategy like doubling or add ten or something–but I am probably trying to make it match too closely, can’t organize it, and then end up skipping it. Mental Math I think should be done every day. 

The Do Now I think I could do other things with, so maybe other routines could come in there?

I’ve been doing Estimation 180 for…eight years? and I think its really good. I really like Esti-Mysteries too though. Is it bad to switch it up? What about Estimation Clipboards? Do I need to estimate every day?

Stand & Talks I don’t think need to happen every day but my goal is about 2/week. These were reasonably good at thinking of to tie in with content but I would like to have some others available to throw in wherever–I used the number grid from one of the Summit Presentations (Sunil Singh?) one day but I would like to have others so that if I can’t think of a good one that ties into content I’m still able to do 2/week. 

Mental Math is tied into fluency but I’ve read about other things that I think could do more and are equally important–I think Number Talks would be great here. I really like the idea of students explaining strategies. I also like doing dot talks–it is amazing to get almost everyone to volunteer at some point because they feel safe (and that they must not the rest of the time). I’ve done both of those but very poorly & sporadically. This is probably the biggest area of improvement but I have no organization whatsoever here. If I had a list I could probably do a lot better at this. (Also I know I should prepare for them more than a list but I think I need to get the ball rolling by actually *doing* them and then I can work on doing them well.)

And here’s where we start to go off a cliff…

WODB is fun (could do as a Do Now sometimes?)

I’ve seen Pam Harris present on Number Strings (trying to get my hands on her book but they couldn’t find it for me) and I think I’d like to try those–does that substitute for a Number Talk? Only sometimes? Never?

I’d like to do more with 2 Truths and a Lie somewhere. 

Some of these are more instructional strategies but some are definitely routines (and I think I need to make them routine to be able to do them in a way that doesn’t turn into a resource-bonanza-mess). 

I tried making a spreadsheet, I tried making a list and I tried vaguely setting some goals. But none of those are really working. My implementation is really spotty and I’m not doing the things I wanted too.