Lost Time

 Making the most of transition times

I was reminded yet again early this week how much valuable time is lost during a school day. I went into a year 6/7 class this week to do a demo lesson and waited as students arrived, handed over money for camp, gave messages of one kind and another to the teacher. Ten minutes went by until she was free to introduce me to the class. And what were the students doing during that time? They were chatting or dreaming on the carpet. There are many transitions during the day and time gets lost if we are not careful. I suspect that over a week this down time could absorb an hour or even more of the roughly precious 25 hours contact time.

My response — we need lots of worthwhile short challenging problems or puzzles that require students to think and to review earlier content. They can do this together or alone. For example, here is a decimal problem that could keep most Grade 5, 6 or 7 classes busy for a while.

This kind of puzzle shows what I mean. Students do not have to arrive at an answer necessarily and they may not find all the possible answers but they do need to be challenged in odd moments. Provide a space where students can during the day or over a few days add their answers if they want to. Some students may continue the exploration of possible answers at home as well. The year 6/7 teacher reported to me yesterday that she has set this up already in a way that mirrors ‘Letters and Numbers’ (the TV show) and the kids are buying in really well so far. And here is something for the Lower Primary grades:

Hint: For the Make 9 problem think decimals and be careful with your place value. For the Totals problem, answers written on a PostIt could be arranged to make a bar chart,
If you do find time for these, your comments would be most welcome.