Today my class worked with math buckets. My teacher explained to me that she had been trying to set these up all of last semester and finally was able to. She created a chart where the students are listed high, medium, and low in their math skills. The chart has pictures which represent the labeled drawer for the students math buckets.
The students knew which bucket when she went through and pointed to the picture corresponding with their bucket. She changes the difficulty of the bucket to go with the students working with it, but the bucket content is similar each time, just different difficulty levels. That way each student works their different math skills each time they do math buckets. I worked with one of the low skilled groups today. Their bucket was Darth Vader which consisted of the apple bingo activity.
I held the apple bag and both the boys would grab one apple at a time. They would have to tell me the number and then when they did correctly they were allowed to color in the apple with the same number. One boy ran into difficulty with the teens. When he would get a number like 14, he would respond with 24. I tried to explain to him that if there is the number 1 in-front, it is not going to be in the twenties, but in the teens. After a little bit of practice, he was able to catch on and tell me the correct teen numbers. With doing this activity a couple more times, I would confidently say that both these boys would be able to identify all their numbers up to twenty.
This is a great example, but you need to go deeper in terms of thinking about what you think the student response tells you about their mathematical understanding and what you might do next with the student to push their understanding.
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