The Broadcaster and The Artist

We have a 30-minute intervention period four days a week at my school as part of our RtI program. Monday and Tuesday are slotted for math intervention. Thursday and Friday are slotted for Language Arts intervention. The students that report to me on Friday are supposed to participate in some type of activity that helps them improve with collaboration and/or communication. Here's a quick little activity we did last week you can try with your students. It's really cool to see how the students communicate with each other.

I made these two slides in Keynote.

I took my students to the outside lunch tables to sit across from their partner. One partner (artist) had a blank sheet of paper and their partner (broadcaster) had one of the sheets pictured above.

Job Descriptions:
Broadcaster: without showing the artist the sheet of paper, use descriptive language to help them draw the picture in front of you. You can't touch the artist's paper or point where anything should be drawn.

Artist: follow the directions of the broadcaster and ask any clarifying questions.

Add or subtract any rules you'd like. When groups are finished, have them compare their drawing with the original. After they see how accurate or inaccurate they were and have a good laugh, switch roles. If they had the yellow sheet during round 1, their group now gets the blue sheet during round 2.

The fun part is having each group pick their favorite drawing and we do a little competition back in class. I display their drawings using the document camera and we share some compliments and some good laughs. Hope you give it a shot.

Some Student work:

Broadcast,
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Daily Something [WCYDWT]

#WCYDWT

What can you do with this?

Why would a teacher use this?

How would you use this in your class?

What would you add? subtract? replace? other?

How would you use the information from student performance on this?

How could this be used as a pre-assessment? an assessment? an intervention?

Take a few minutes to complete each day. What do you notice?

Hint:
*  **  ***  ****  *****  ******  *******  ********  *********

Answer as many or as few of these questions... or feel free to add your own.

This:

Thanks in advance!
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Intervention strategies

@TmathC tweeted about possible presenters and sessions at Twitter Math Camp 2014 next year.

Selfishly, I wanted to think of a session I could present on so I could justify to the boss (my wife) that attending #TMC14 was within our means. Instead, I looked through the list found here and saw something missing: a session dealing with intervention strategies or techniques for helping students who struggle in math class. Then it dawned on me, whenever I attend CMC South, I rarely see sessions dealing with intervention for students who struggle in math. Why?

Intervention, to me, is not reteaching, relearning, or repeating the same lesson to students by yelling it at them in a louder voice. By the way, don't tell Sadie you're reteaching. I'm right there with her on the Blame Game. Let's face it, every student comes to our class lacking some type of prerequisite skill, some more than others. It's not about blaming the previous teacher, previous curriculum, the "apathetic" student, the "unsupportive" home, or any other scapegoat. I know I've let students down in the past (and currently) and feel bad as they move to the next grade level. However, I want to be a better, more effective teacher, especially for students who typically struggle in math class.  

I doubt I'm the only one who could benefit from more intervention strategies and techniques. I believe every teacher who actually cares about their students would appreciate more intervention strategies no matter where they teach, what they teach, or who they teach. Being at a new school this year, I really could benefit from more intervention strategies.  Most of my students this year need intervention badly. They need help with numerous elementary concepts. I need more strategies to help students become better math students. I need more strategies to help students increase their number sense.

I'm not looking for a silver bullet. I'm not looking for someone to tell me to reteach it using similar worksheets, but change the values of the coefficients, or numerators, or integers, or percentages. I love the #MTBoS and all the great resources, but I feel it lacks this crucial element: intervention. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm absolutely ignorant of some rich resource somewhere. I'm asking for help. Do you know someone who writes about intervention? Are there reputable intervention programs/sites online? What intervention strategies do you use that are effective? Please share. Go to the comments and list blogs, sites, or people I need to follow who have intervention strategies I can use. Thanks in advance.

Intervention,
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