The ORIGO Approach to Teaching Skills
ORIGO believes that students master skills over time as they engage in four distinctly different types of activities.
Introducing
In the first stage, students are introduced to the skill using contextual situations, concrete materials, and pictorial representations to help them make sense of the mathematics.
Reinforcing
In the second stage, the concept or skill is reinforced through activities or games. This stage provides students the opportunity to understand the concepts and skills as it connects the concrete and pictorial models of the introductory stage to the abstract symbols of the practice stage.
Practicing
When students are confident with the concept or skill, they move to the third stage where visual models are no longer used. This stage develops accuracy and speed of recall. Written and oral activities are used to practice the skill to develop fluency.
Extending
Finally, as the name suggests, students extend their understanding of the concept or skill in the last stage. For example, the use-tens thinking strategy for multiplication can be extended beyond the number fact range to include computation with greater whole numbers and eventually to decimal fractions.
Click below to watch our ORIGO One video on our approach to teaching skills.
