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Blog #2-Working in Small Groups

I have had the opportunity to work with small groups in a few different classrooms.  In the classrooms I have been in, the students were grouped together according to their proficiency in the subject they were working on.  I think that is a good way to group them. If you have students of all levels in one group, sometimes a student that might be struggling won't feel confident enough to participate in the activity.

Kindergarten students were working on math games when I helped them.  The teacher told me ahead of time which groups would need a more difficult version of the game.  The students loved playing the game.  They had a stack of cards with numbers on them.  They would each draw two cards and then come up with the sum of the two cards.  If they got the answer right, they got to feed the cards to the "number monster". Once all the cards were gone, the game was over.  The students on a more advanced level could choose three or four cards to add together.

I spent about 10 minutes with each group of students.  That seemed to be enough time to get through the game twice and keep them interested and excited about playing the game.  I was really impressed that the teacher had it set up so well and that the students knew what group they were in and where they needed to go.

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