October’s LOVED that LESSON! Organizing our math work

It’s time for October’s “Loved That Lesson” linky and this month I am sharing a lesson we did last week that I am hoping is going to make a huge difference ALL year with my students!
This lesson started in my mind a few weeks ago when I realized just HOW much work we need to do with organizing our math work, working precisely, labeling our work, and so on.  I spent some time with my students brainstorming a list of what “quality” math work would look like–and what “precision” means.
We spent some time looking over our work and thinking about which of these are the trickiest–and each student set a goal for themselves to try to improve the level of precision of their math work.  We have been really digging into the Standards for Mathematical Practice, and it was time to raise the expectations a notch!
I knew that in order to really help them “see” what some of these components looked like, we would have to go on a hunt for samples, so over the next few days I kept my eyes open and asked my students to keep THEIR eyes open.  I started to find examples and made copies.  As I did, I started to hang them up to use as “mentor math”.
I hung them up on one of our closet doors in clear view.
I LOVED watching my students start to take some of the ideas students used and apply them to their own work.
I asked students to help me identify what they saw that made the work “precise”
The students started really tuning in to work quality–and I heard them complimenting each other and DEFINITELY raising the bar for quality.  I LOVED it!  Make sure to stop by and check out the other links below for more lessons people loved!

Meg