Over the past two school years I have been working towards fully implementing the Building Thinking Classrooms approach to teaching math. I’ve found that this has also led to me looking for a much wider library of rich math tasks. Changing my approach to teaching math has really opened my eyes to what is possible to get my students thinking and collaborating. One of my favourite activities for open ended and collaborative math are Three Act Math Tasks. I have put the links to a few sites to find three act tasks below. Three Act tasks do require us to give up the reins a little and let students try to work through the problem with a variety of strategies. These are real world tasks that are highly engaging, the familiar contexts of many of the tasks encourages student participation and there is an entry point in every task for every student in the room. Three act tasks rely heavily on images and videos reducing the need for students to read and lowering that barrier to problem solving for our struggling readers. Many of the tasks I use with my grade 4s involve food or money things they have some experience with and real life connection to. I have attached a power point I used for a pro-d day workshop I presented to my school’s staff in May where we tried a 3 act task together then created some in our grade groups.
https://gfletchy.com/3-act-lessons/
https://www.sfusdmath.org/3-act-tasks.html
