This year, teachers and principals on every elementary site in my district have asked me about 3Act Math. After a dozen demo lessons, many of them have delivered lessons in their classes.

In all the demos, I’ve pointed people to three places:

• Graham Fletcher’s database of K-5 tasks for 3Act Math Tasks
• This worksheet I cobbled together from several #MTBOS sources (script on page 3 for teachers who need hand-holding).
• Dan Meyer’s description of 3Act Math and how it works.
• A YouTube playlist with all the videos is linked at the bottom of this post.

Cheryl Demus of Allen Avenue Elementary School teaches Kindergarten, bravely charges into new ideas and learning, is confident in her ability to run a class well, and regularly takes on student teachers from nearby universities.

Of course, as the Instructional Coach, I don’t have favorite teachers and serve all my staff equally.
So I’ll just say that Cheryl’s class is one I’d be thrilled to enroll my kids into.

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For those unfamiliar with the 3Act Math task, I’ll give brief rundowns as we go (videos at the end).

Act One – the Hook

Peas in a Pod (Act 1) from Graham Fletcher on Vimeo.

Start with the media and get students asking questions. This is the time to make sure all students can get on board, which means we don’t zip to the math too quickly.

For me, that means starting with,

“Tell your neighbor what you’re thinking right now,”

before asking,

“What do you notice and what do you wonder?”

As you’ll notice in the video, I treat the student comment, “I notice there are hands in the video,” with the same degree of interest as “I wonder how many peas in all of the pods.” It’s important for Act One to celebrate all student responses, and this is most clear at the K-2 level, where most of the responses are hot nonsense.

It’s highly unusual for a student to suggest a question so close to the one that I want. Most of the time, the teacher has to fake it with something like,

“Wanna know what I heard walking around? I heard people asking, [the central question I want them to ask]. Show me a thumbs-up if you were wondering that, too.”

Of course, the whole room raises a thumbs-up, because sure now they’re wondering that, too.

Graham Fletcher (author of this task and many others) calls this, “co-creating the question.” I call it “nudging students when they need a nudge, but letting them wander for a bit first.”

You know your class; you know how much wandering is helpful.

Number Line

The addition of the barbell on the worksheet (which I totally copied from Andrew Stadel, author of Estimation180) provides two important scaffolds that include all students.

1.) Little students have number sense that’s all over the place. A guess that’s too high and a guess that’s too low help them to fine-tune their guesses. I’ve seen many Kindergarten teachers ask, “Is 400 a reasonable guess?”

To a six-year-old? Of course it is.

Tracy Zager notes in her fantastic book that intuition, like any skill or muscle, can be strengthened by practicing. So if we want better Number Sense and more reasonable answers, we must give students a chance to practice reasonableness.

Note the questions around 3:30.

Did you catch the spot where 6-year-olds think that “between” and “middle” are synonyms? Adorable. My inner high-school teacher took a seething breath and muttered, “SMP6.”

Act Two – the Journey

Once we’ve established a central question, now we need more information to answer it.

“What are some clues that would help answer that question?”

or

“What information might be helpful to figure out ______”

This was a great snapshot for how messy Act Two can be with little ones. In the playlist below, videos 5 through 7 are all dealing with Act Two.

I just realized that Graham (the author) made Act Two media from a Word Document download so that anybody can scaffold for their class. Here’s how it looks:

Thankfully, Cheryl had advised me to ask, “What math can we do here to answer our question?” As soon as we got too deep in the weeds looking for bugs, I caved and pulled that question out.

Now, Math Teachers can testify that I’m not subtle using confusion as my default mood for classroom moves with little ones:

• What was that number for? I got lost.
• Where did this number come from?
• Wait, so to do [operation], we should [casual language]?
• I think I get it, someone explain that a different way.

There’s a spot in there when students start yelling, “six” out of nowhere. I asked Cheryl what that was about.
“You do your twos wrong,” she smiled and pointed to the correct two in foot-high cardboard.

Apparently, kids this age still flip (reflect) their letters and numbers, and my curly 2 looks like a flipped 6.

And—after probably 15 minutes of peas and pods and addition—we arrived at 17 peas.

Time to check our work.

Act Three – the Reveal

Peas in a Pod (Act 3) from Graham Fletcher on Vimeo.

After Act Three, many students didn’t quite get that we were correct with our math, so Mr. Vaudrey choral counted and injected surprise and excitement and I’m kinda glad there’s no footage.

I love surprise and excitement, but I’m not sure how I could have better tied the answer to the process.

Possibly because the process is way more important to me.

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Stuff I’ll Change For Next Time

In Part 6, I asked Kindergarteners to count silently in their mind. That might be the record for “Greenest Move the Middle School Teacher Tried With Kindergarteners.”

Big picture, the pace was blisteringly fast when I rewatched the footage. The teacher had no issue, but I’ll bet a coding of student responses would reveal my attention going to about 1/3 of the students.

I didn’t check for EL students or students with processing delays, but it’s safe to say that the “good math” students in my lesson where the fastest and the loudest. Ouch.

Related to that idea; I’m being reminded how difficult it can be for me to implement equitable practices without some kind of a system. If I just trust myself with, “I know the research and I know bias is a problem,” there’s a good chance I’ll just do the same kind of teaching y’all saw in Video 6.

UPDATE: After reading this post, Cheryl weighed in with another sentence frame she likes to use:

I’m hearing a lot from the same people, and I would love to hear what someone else thinks.

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What Else?

Primary grade teachers, I know y’all have some feedback for me.

Let’s have it. I wouldn’t post all this if I wasn’t looking to get better.

~Matt “Curly Two” Vaudrey

UPDATE: 22 April 2019 – Later that day, a screw popped out of the teacher chair. Students were convinced it was because the “big man” sat in it.

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And here’s a playlist with all the videos: