Student Work Blog - Amy T.

This past week I watched my students participate in math stations again. One station they do regularly is one involving puzzles. I don't have a picture, but I can describe what they do for the station. They get together into a group of three or four students and put together puzzles of different difficulties. Some are easy, some are harder. All the puzzles are from the 90's, so the students don't really know the pictures on the front. This is better in my opinion, because then they can't cheat by just putting the picture together. The goal, my mentor teacher told me, is to have them use critical thinking skills and basic geometry skills to figure out how to put the pieces together. This invokes not only their skills in geometry, but also their communication skills. I know that's not specific to math, but it's very important that they learn to communicate their thoughts and ideas about problems. Watching them do these puzzles is so interesting. They first try to put the pieces together just willy-nilly, and then, once they've realized that won't work, they get down to figuring out which puzzle cut-out piece goes with which puzzle jut-out piece. Once they've figured out which certain pieces go with which other pieces, it's smooth sailing from there. I liked watching them do this task, and I think it's a good communication task, but I don't think it's a high-level task. It does not require them to draw on any background knowledge, and it is essentially just guess-and-check for finding an answer. If I were to try to make it into a higher level task, I would put numbers on each puzzle piece and then have the students add or subtract the numbers when they get two pieces to fit together. It would not be extremely high-level even with the modification, but it would be more mathematics than they are currently getting out of the puzzle-building exercise.