This school year I am going through MRIS (Math Recovery Intervention Specialist) training. It is nothing short of amazing. Finally, math intervention programing that is 100% developmentally appropriate, focused, sequential and aims to make a child a "whole mathematician" identifying gaps and getting all areas of math to line up, then advancing students along a trajectory. Enough about that. Actually that's not enough but...this post is about working with the very lowest first graders who are hard to focus.
The first little guy I worked with in a one-on-one half hour session, was to say the least, all over the place. He repeated kindergarten and thus was starting his third year of school as a first grader and he did not have one-to-one, oral counting to 100, and he did not know how to show me 6 fingers. He would count one hand of fingers as sometimes 4, sometimes 5, sometimes 6, without noticing there was anything off.
In all truthfulness I was scared to take this boy...I was not confident that I could straighten this out. When he counted a group of counters, he used two hands and pushed the counters in every direction not knowing which he counted and which he didn't, starting and stopping and starting over many times. I should not say this but it frightened me. How, after two years of kindergarten, was he still doing this?
As I started with him, he could come down happy as a clam and once entering my room he was grabbing and noticing every single thing. "What's this? What's that up there on that shelf? Can I play with this? Ohhhh! A giant play dollar!" I wanted to strip my room bare- it was just too much for him that I had shelves and bins of stuff.
I started with activities such as counting a group of items and slowing down the count, using one hand, lining up the counters in a line or array, as you might expect. We worked next on finger flashes and that one hand was always 5, and on to subtilizing with dot cards...This little guy did the best he could but he was still very distractible and interrupting to ask questions, interject play ("this is my pizza for the homeless") notice things not on the table, and he would fall off of his chair frequently, or turn around and give me his back, ignoring me. I was trying to figure things out as his progress seemed very slow.
One day, I printed a generic board game from the Internet, and tried to do all of our little activities in the context of a game. He was excited. He chose two men to move. He was both of them. I did not even have to play. We started the game with him having to count a small group of counters and if he counted them correctly (checking by placing the counters in a 10-frame so he would then begin to recognize 10-frame numbers and how many more to make 10 or how many the number was past 5), he rolled a die, had to subtilize the die, and move his piece. After enough rolls with one-to-one practice, the next few turns were practicing finger-flashed numbers. He would finger flash the number, have to find its numeral from some number cards, and if correct, he pulled a tongue depressor that had dots on it that he had to subtilize and move. Literally the more skills he had to do before he moved, the better.
As his skills grew, his turns would be to read 2-digit numbers, tell me one more and one less, roll two die and add, then roll a final die and move that many.
THIS TOTALLY CALMED DOWN THIS LITTLE GUY'S ALL-OVER-THE-PLACENESS.
This boy never fell off of his chair again. He never looked away, laid on the table, or grabbed anything that he should not have, once I intertwined the activities. It really worked. BINGO!
So, the silly thing is that I took on a second student- a girl. This girl was physically not quite as busy as the boy (though she also falls off of her chair as a regular thing) but she would change the subject constantly any time the math got hard. Reminder after reminder...I even took her at different times of the day to see if that would help her off-task chatter, she was a happy gorgeous girl, but...a tough nut to crack.
I don't even know why it took me so long, but the other day after fretting over the slow progress with her, I was getting bored with the same session goals over and over and had to spice it up. I decided to pull out a generic game board. I did the same thing I did with the boy and for the first several turns on the game, she pulled a stick, read the 2-digit number and had to count on, then roll and move. She nailed it like she had not the day before without the game part of the session. The next few turns after that she had to count back. Nailed it. Then solve addition problems that got progressively harder, and finally missing addend problems until the game was over. Her off task chatter was MINIMUM. I don't know why I did not weave in more, sooner. When she left, my jaw was hanging open.
What calmed down these two kiddos could be a coincidence but...I have a little feeling I am on to something.
As I reflected on the effect of blending and mixing many things at the same time, I thought about the media and games students are playing. I remember when my daughter (now 24) was little and I got her a National Geographic VHS tape. It was called GeoKids. We watched it and it made my head hurt. It changed the visual every few seconds- images were fading in and out, swiping in from the side and bam- a new image continuously with very few lasting more than 10 seconds. I never thought she would like it. I grew up with the calming images of Jacques Cousteau and the humor of Gilligan's Island. This was a totally foreign style to me. Just maybe these sessions were more appealing to today's kids? I'll run with it!
