Two Routines
for
Rich Math Teaching
Teaching elementary math has always been good hard work. At the heart of teaching math for deep understanding where every voice matters is talk – rich discussion of rich tasks. We offer two big routines that can help you and your students tap into two central goals that are the engine of deep mathematical learning:
Give students meaningful mathematical work – tasks that provoke thinking about big ideas.
Create opportunities for students to make their thinking visible to you and each other. Get them talking and sharing ideas.
Our routines – Look-Think-Talk and Off You Go – each create opportunities for rich and worthy mathematical talk. See more about each routine below and then search through our archives to find an activity right for your students tomorrow.
Look-Think-Talk
Look-Think-Talk can be used to supplement any lesson as a brief whole class activity, or it can be an entire lesson with time for group exploration before a whole class discussion.
In the Look-Think-Talk routine, show students an intriguing image from our archive and pose a mathematical question
Give students time to think and then create opportunities, such as partner or whole class discussion, for students to talk about their ideas.
The goal is to generate multiplicity: multiple ideas, multiple strategies, multiple answers, and multiple questions from multiple voices.
Off You Go
In the Off You Go routine, show students an example of a concept that they may know a bit about already, such as a circle, an array, the number 10, or a pattern.
Then, invite them to search their environment for other examples of that concept that they can bring back in some way to share. Students might take pictures, draw sketches, bring objects to show, or make lists.
Off You Go can be used as a classroom or school scavenger hunt, with the goal of connecting mathematical ideas with students’ spaces and, collectively, seeing a tantalizing range of representations of a single concept.
How to Find an Activity You Can Use
Choose a Routine
Browse our Archives of Activities
You can scroll through the full selection of Look-Think-Talk activities or Off You Go activities, or, for Look-Think-Talk activities, filter by grade or big idea. Either way, we got something you can try tomorrow.
Not sure how to match an activity to the concepts you’re teaching?
Have a look at the Big Ideas our activities create opportunities to explore.
What if I teach remotely?
Both of these routines can be used beautifully remotely!
Look-Think-Talk can be done synchronously using screen-sharing and facilitating a discussion about students’ ideas. Use breakout rooms to give students opportunities for small group discussion. You can post our pdf versions to your online classroom management platforms for students to download.
Off You Go can be an asynchronous activity that you launch by screen-sharing the activity. Then send students off to comb their lived environments for examples of the concept. This could take anywhere from 15 minutes to all week. Ask students to bring back these examples, using photos, sketches, a list, or the objects themselves that they can post to your online classroom management platform or show on camera. Then lead a synchronous discussion in which students share what they found.