What does constructivist learning style look like at Elementary?
Constructivist classrooms at early elementary school focus on three key factors: the important role of children, authentic and purposeful interactions among classroom participants, and engagement in an academic activity (Rainer Dangel et al., 2004). The role of the child in the classroom represented a collaborative environment with individualist and collective goals. Children often refer to their classroom, as “our classroom,” and children’s talk was valued with opportunities to collaborate and encouraged. Authentic purposeful interactions have centers, project work, and “game day.” Additionally, children are promoted to negotiate through interactions. Finally, children are encouraged to have a collaborative engagement in academic activities by incorporating their interest and experiences. (Rainer Dangel et al., 2004).
Here is a list provided by Rainer Dangel et al., 2004 to create a constructivist classroom:
Physical environment:
- access and use of materials by children • children’s and teachers ownership of environment • intentional thought about materials and how they relate to learning • logic or coherence to environment/materials • loosely-defined spaces that have alternative uses • child-centered transitions
Social Environment
children’s responsibility for classroom, instruction, schedule, routines • children have structured and spontaneous opportunities for decision-making • teachers are truly engaged with children during interactions • self and community management • explicit opportunities for acknowledging respect, caring, conflict, negative emotions
Linguistic Environment
- informal conversations rather than question and answer • purposeful talk that is related to work • real questions and real interest in answers • initiation of ideas from children • encouragement of peer interactions
Intellectual:
Intellectual • project work develops layers of content knowledge and allows different levels of engagement and interaction • challenges errors and acknowledges them as opportunities • clear encouragement of self-assessment • variety of groupings for instruction
Curriculum
children encouraged to see connections in learning • balance of activity growing out of children’s experience • large periods of work time • variety and choice of instructional activities
What is a great example of learning style at Elementary?
A great example of a constructivist elementary education curriculum for math is called everyday mathematics, and it has been routinely shown to narrow the academic gap in mathematics cross-cultural (cf. Grady et al., 2012).
Here is a quick explanation of Grade 5 Curriculum and how individuals go about doing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3f0pUwSW-c
Additionally, here are video links to two ways to do partial sums methods by understanding the process behind it not the procedure
http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/teaching-topics/computation/add-partial-sums/
Additionally there is the homework for this portion on the class.
Lastly a project idea from my experience working with kids:
Generally, when working with kids to teach math, I find the best solution is to talk it through with them but engage it in a way to make it seem more interesting.
Take a silly example: Explaining fraction we often use pizza, but I think its more fun to use Star Wars references. So I combine them for a 6-year-old tutoring session.
If Chewy eats one and a half imperial pizzas, and Han Solo eats three-fourths a pizza, will there be enough galactic pizzas slices for Yoda to eat at least 2 slices and Luke to eat a third if they ordered 3, eight-slice pizzas.
Other great resources I have found:
Hopefully, this is a great starting point for many of you. Otherwise, like always add some resources in the bottom you have found to work in the past.
Teaching Math Teachers 