Math Habits of Mind

One of the things we have been learning about in our math studio class throughout the district is something called Math Habits of Mind (MHOM). Things that strong mathematicians do. We are introducing these habits early on in kindergarten, and helping them to become automatic for kids. One of the biggest things for kindergarten students is meta cognition- thinking about their own thinking. One way we are helping them with this is by posting the MHOM posters in our classroom, teaching what they mean, and pointing out when kids do those things. We now have small versions of the posters that kids can help themselves to if they use that habit of mind during math time. Today was the first day, and I am noticing already that kids are more aware of their thinking and habits when there is something concrete for them to understand when they have done it.

Today we introduced the habit "Listen for Understanding". We talked about how we use this one especially during our Mathematician Dyads, or structured math talk. This is when we talk in partnerships about math thinking. Today we did a dyad to share how the kids were planning to sort their bugs. Here is the structure of the dyad we did today:

Partner 1 shares
Partner 2 repeats what they heard
Partner 1 checks for understanding (were they listening, did they miss anything??)
Partner 2 shares
Partner 1 repeats
Partner 2 checks for understanding
Partners talk about how their ideas are the same and different

We use these dyads in math to push student thinking deeper, and help children learn to listen to others ideas, and think about them. It's a steep learning curve, but is really changing the level of thinking happening in math and in our classroom every day. It's truly amazing to watch!