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Exploratory learning classes try new tack - Jacksonville Journal-Courier

WHITE HALL — Some North Greene Junior High School students are taking a hands-on approach to learning math. 

The goal is to improve test scores while helping the students learn about how math works in the real world, said Ora Tucker, the school’s seventh- and eighth-grade exploratory math teacher. 

Every seventh- and eighth-grader has a regular class and an a exploratory class, this year, the first for exploratory math, Tucker said. 

Instead of simply memorizing fractions and their rules, for example, students are tasked with figuring out recipes, using math to determine how much of an ingredient they need. 

The students also sometimes use Cubelets, blocks that can be assembled into a functioning robot as they learn skills including computational thinking, engineering, design and collaboration, Tucker said. 

Seeing that light click on is what’s great about hands-on learning, Tucker said, adding that it’s a beautiful thing to see students figure out how pieces go together, Tucker said. 

Tucker has had students in the past who absolutely hated math, but the exploratory course is showing them math isn’t so bad, she said. 

Students are baking cookies this month in class, she said. 

“It was a new class we created this year in order to address some of the needs of our students,” said Gina Edwards, eighth-grade language arts teacher at North Greene. “We can work on improving reading skills, writing skills, and other specific areas where students are struggling.” 

Edwards has 68 students in exploratory learning classes, typically with somewhere from 15 to 20 students in a classroom for an 83-minute class period. 

Exploratory courses are a way to work with students and challenge them in different ways, Edwards said, noting that teachers had wanted to incorporate the classes into the school day for a while. This year, the scheduling worked out. 

Students work through stations and work on skills at their own pace. The courses reach students who are struggling academically and those who are thriving by challenging them in different ways, Edwards said. 

Mondays are “Mystery Mondays” and props are set up in the classroom for students to analyze as if they were detectives. 

“It touches on a lot of our course standards,” Edwards said, noting students really enjoy the mysteries. 

There also are plans to create “escape rooms,” Edwards said. 

“My job is more to watch and facilitate and let them experiment and learn as I kind of supervise,” Edwards said. 

So far, students seem to really like the exploratory classes. 

“They like the freedom of doing something out of the ordinary, being outside the box,” Edwards said. 

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