This year, our second grade conducted multiple classroom transformations for students to apply what they learned in a given math unit. The transformations targeted grade-level standards, academics, and social-emotional learning. Teachers reported the following impacts on social-emotional and academic learning:
- Promotes collaboration and problem-solving.
- Challenges give many opportunities to explain their thinking to others.
- Creates engaging classroom elements through gamification and hands-on interactions.
- Students gain a better understanding and solidify the content from the unit.
- Synthesize knowledge of standards through real-life contexts.
- Hands-on problem solving and promotes social discussion.
- Long term remembering of concepts because of the high level of engagement.
Some of the themes and learning standards included safari where students learned about the estimated length of things, royalty where students learned about telling time, grocery store where students learned about comparing three-digit numbers, magician where students learned about addition and subtraction, race car where students learned about number lines and March Madness which was a mixed review of lessons.
These classroom transformations were not limited to math but also incorporated reading and writing. It was wonderful to see students engaged and mastering important second-grade standards.
