Math Exploration

Today, we had our first inquiry lesson!  It was very basic to get the students introduced to inquiry, and they seemed to like it. 

What we did:

Explored 'math tools'.  Each group had a bucket of math tools to explore. Each bucket that was passed around had a different material in it. For example, one bucket had cubes in it. Another bucket had shape manipulatives in it. Most students did not know what they were but were encouraged to talk within their group about how they could be used in math. I allowed the groups to talk for a few minutes with each bucket.  They came up with some really interesting ideas too!  After we did this activity and the groups were able to give their opinion of what the tools were for, I went over how we will be using these in the classroom for math. This was such a fun activity and they were able to learn what the materials were actually used for.