Everyone is smart in their own way

Before math class this week, I knew what tangrams were, but I had never really worked with them before. It was fascinating to see how some people could go right to the answer to the giraffe puzzle, while others sometimes didn’t even get it when someone showed it to them. And it was also interesting when we were asked to double its size, how some people were able to envision it, while others gave up in frustration. It once again reinforced the idea that there are many different ways to be smart at math!


I found myself wondering how tangrams might work into the “curriculum”. It is obviously a form of logic problem, and it contains shapes which are the basics of geometry. But, I love how it demonstrates dramatically that some people have more of an affinity to spatial problems than others might. That being good at it doesn’t make you “smarter” than some else, but just a different kind of thinker. That same person who has difficulty making that giraffe out of tangrams might be extremely adept at complex algorithms that the rest of us would cringe at! Being good at one thing, but not the other, doesn’t make a person “smarter” or “dumber”; it just makes them different. And differences in our classrooms are not only something that we should acknowledge, but something that we should be proud of and use to our learning advantage.


This was definitely a “group worthy” task! It gives those spatial learners an opportunity to be seen by the group as smart, which is very important to the whole of the entire classroom as they move onto the next group worthy task where those “spatial” kids might need help from the “algorithmic” kids.


Everyone is smart in their own way. I think it’s part of our job as teachers to help each kid realize that.

I didn't realize that was there...

This week I was once again reminded of how much I haven’t been paying attention to the things around me. It’s so easy to take everything at face value without stopping to think about why things are the way they are.



This week I read the first 3 chapters from “Word Identification Strategies” by Barbara Fox and I began looking at the classrooms I went into in a whole new way. I walked into Ms. Bunny’s room for the first time since school ended last spring and examples of what I had been reading about began to jump out at me. I had been in this classroom more than any other over the last four years, and until now, my mind just took for granted the things that I saw! I have spent too much time seeing the forest and not the trees that make it up.

There are words and labels all over the room. “Desk, chair, calendar, clock, red, blue, green, flower, and airplane”; the list goes on and on. The words within the posted daily schedule are words with corresponding pictures. It’s the same with the tables and graphs that are part of the daily morning routine on the Activeboard. The students' names are everywhere throughout the classroom. On their pencil boxes, on the white board, under pictures they drew of themselves.

When I first entered, the students were presenting their homework for the week. This week’s letter was “F”. Their kindergarten homework consists of a letter of the week that they need to make a “project” for. It is usually a standard piece of paper or construction paper with words starting with that letter. They can be cut out of magazines, clip art from the computer, small glued objects, or pictures drawn by the student. During sharing, they tell their classmates about what they did, then they get in groups of 2 or 3 (including someone who “forgot” their homework) and they talk about it “knee to knee” on the floor. I had known about this homework since my son was in this class 4 years ago, so it was familiar to me. But this is the first time I actually considered WHY she arranged the “homework” like this!

I could envision the higher level of thinking the student needed to use to complete this (as opposed to just coloring pictures given to them or tracing words). I saw the opportunity for different learning styles to come into play (draw, write letters, computer skills, verbal, possible 3D projects as well). And I saw it as an important way of incorporating families into the importance of learning together and a way to get the students to think about words at home. I saw that by having students "teach" what they knew, they were advancing their own understanding. I hadn’t realized any of that until I began to look at it in a new way through my own learning of literacy.

To quote Kevin Henkes, "all I can say is "WOW"".

What other trees have I not been noticing? It’s a huge forest…