Five regular routines

As my teaching evolves to start with students' thinking and talking, I'm usually beginning my hour long maths lessons with routines that encourage these things. Here are five favourites:

Quick Dot Images

See this by Steve Wyborney. I show an image quickly, then show it a second time; the idea is that almost all students should be able to have seen how many dots there are. But the interesting thing is not how many, but how. Students really like sharing their ways. And the message is: this is something you can do your way; you didn't need to be told how to see this. And - your way is worth sharing.

Students like to do the annotating themselves.
Often I do it: to speed things up, and to model revoicing.

Which One Doesn’t Belong 

Christopher Danielson got the ball rolling with this. Since then, Mary Bourassa has done a great job of collecting WODBs together at wodb.ca . I've blogged about them a while back, and recently.

The idea is that you can justify the choice of any of the four items as the odd one out.

Estimate 

Students write three numbers on a blank number line on their whiteboard, one too big, one too small and as close as you can (Graham Fletcher has some; these can be extended into whole lesson activities which are great modelling activities - and then of course there’s our regular, estimation180).

Estimation is such a key skill that we've also devoted some blogging time to it, with each student making their own estimation challenge.

See, think, wonder 

Last year it was notice and wonder, but I like the differentiation of notice into see and think, and feel it's worth distinguishing the two. (Both are brilliant though!) I'm reading Making Thinking Visible, and this is one of their routines.

The point is just to present an image and see what people see, preferably recording it all. 

This one developed into a really interesting debate

I've also adapted this to be what equations do you see, often presenting an image of Cuisenaire rods:

Counting Circles 

I've blogged about this before. The idea is to count from different starting points, with different jumps. We do it round in a circle. Then we stop, and think about what the number three or four jumps on would be. Students share how they know.

NEW!
Fraction Talks

I haven't used these yet, but this is a great idea, and Nat Banting is developing a really useful site with lots of images: fractiontalks.com - watch this space!