Math Chats

After working with the resource Number Talks by Sherry Parrish, I noticed that students were so skilled at chatting about numbers.  I quickly decided that having math chats in other strands of math would also be of benefit to building basic comprehension and being able to justify student thinking.

I have used photos, real-life objects and begun to build "math" props to encourage student discourse.  Here's one of my favourites so far:

This one was built with toilet paper rolls and basic supplies such as construction paper and paper towel rolls.  A simple question was put forward:  "What Math do you see?"  The goal is to encourage student ideas.  There are a multitude of possibilities when looking at strands such as Measurement, Number Sense, Probability, Data Management, and Geometry.  My goal is to encourage student questions and have the students answer or solve their own questions.