Stained Glass
Stained Glass is a skip-counting activity, and I like to project it in front of the whole classroom. Say we're skip counting by threes: zero, three, six, nine. I ask Jack what comes next, and Jack says 12. Then I ask Beatrice, and Beatrice says 16. That's a mistake, and you notice the colour isn't quite right. Now my whole purpose is to make sure Beatrice doesn't feel badly. So I immediately agree with her, and then I wait for the other kids to step in and say, "No, no, no." Beatrice and I share a little mini failure together, and we put it right: it's 15.
Notice that I'm choosing which child answers next. I don't have children raising their hands, because I don't want to know what the extroverted kids know. I want to know what the average child in my classroom knows. After a while, the kids will be doing this themselves, and they'll find they don't have to do all of the clicks: they can just hold down the mouse. Why are they motivated? The gifted kids and the struggling kids are both motivated by the same thing, and that's the beauty.
You might notice I include zero in all of these. Usually when we skip count, we go 5, 10, 15, 20. I start at zero because I also want this used for multiplication: zero times five, one times five, two times five. You want to be celebrating zero in elementary school at every possible time. It's the same reason I use a 0 to 99 chart and not a 1 to 100 chart. We live in base 10, and on a 0 to 99 chart all of the numbers with two tens sit together in the same row. So go off and let your kids fill up this table and find some beauty.
- Grades
- 1–6
- Subjects
- Counting & Estimating, Adding & Subtracting, Multiplying & Dividing
- Kind
- Puzzle
Broken TV
Finding Zero
Longest Road