Learning how to talk!

 

It sounds a bit funny, but yes we are learning how to talk and communicate effectively! Twice a week all of Tautoru mix up and head into our problem solving groups. 

During this time, we are learning how to share, explain and justify our strategies. At the moment, we are focusing on listening to our buddy. This is an important skill that we explicitly learn how to do. We must look at our buddy, listen to understand what they are saying and then ask some questions to check we understand.

After we have listened to our buddy share their strategy, we agree or challenge their idea. We talk about how to do this respectfully. In Tautoru, we call it friendly arguing as we are not arguing against the person, but rather discussing whether the strategy is the most effective for that problem or not.

This is the general process that we base our problem solving lessons around.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of learning going on during our problem solving time! Not just learning new maths skills and strategies, but how to communicate, listen and question each other.

To support the kids, we use talk move cards. We focus on one or two cards for a couple of weeks and then start on a new one once we feel we have that card safely stored in our talk toolkit.

Here are the talk move cards we use. Feel free to have a go at using them at home!