When giving your classroom a Building Thinking Classrooms makeover, a lot is going on! You’re trying to provide your students with thinking tasks, form visibly random groups, and use vertical non-permanent surfaces.
Once you get into a groove, you may want to close out the problem-solving session with consolidation and reflection. However, that may be challenging with younger students.
They might still be building stamina, need support engaging in metacognitive, academic conversations or you may just run out of time!
Check Your Understanding Questions
The first consolidation method I tried was extension questions that were just a bit more challenging than what they had been working on. I presented them with three questions of increasing difficulty labeled “mild,” “medium,” and “spicy.”
Students could choose which question they wanted to answer. Interestingly, more often than not, students chose the spicy option. For some reason did not go back to the boards to work on it. Since they were in Kindergarten, I was not assigning this as homework and sometimes we ran out of time to get started!
Games for Consolidation and Reflection
When time or stamina is an issue, giving consolidation a playful twist can be exactly what your students need! I used this approach most often when a task could you more quick practice, like number writing or counting.
I would create a quick game that could be played independently or with a partner, tying it to the story theme from the task. As a bonus, these games could be used later as a math center activity, a favorite time for my students!
Meaningful Notes
Some tasks don’t lend themselves to more questions similar to what they had already been doing. For example, if students are measuring objects around the room, and are working through thin-slicing, just measuring different objects seems kind of redundant.
This might be a time to have students create notes for their “future forgetful selves.” They could document key strategies, tips for measuring accurately, or when to use smaller or larger units. For younger grades, writing can be its own challenge, so consider fill-in-the-blanks, circling items, or drawing pictures instead of writing full sentences.
If you did a task that pulled a lot of interesting strategies that may be a time for the 4 quadrant method, (or less depending on age) where they have a fill-in-the-blank, where they write down a strategy or strategies that they used or that someone else used that makes sense to them, and notes of things to remember for the future.
Final Note
Sometimes a task is just a task for fun and you can celebrate all the great learning and thinking your students did!
Looking for K-2 thinking tasks? You can get the Kindergarten, First Grade, or Second Grade bundles here!
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