Solving puzzles

Today I was presented with a real-life puzzle when asked to work with a student after school. The following narrative is a reflection on the problem-solving lesson that he taught me. Tav apprehensively entered the room while scanning the room as he walked slowly toward the classroom rug. I told him that I heard that he liked blocks as we crossed the room to the block center. He slowly nodded his head and listened as I introduced each part of the block center. When we turned toward the puzzle rack, his face began to glow as he reached for the lock puzzle. “Can I work on this?” he asked. I approved his choice and we proceeded to the table. I attempted a simple get to know question and answer session which quickly failed. Not only did it fail, but the little fellow refused to answer verbally. My thoughts began to race. How can I get him to talk to me and ease his anxiety? I decided to just sit and observe him as he attempted to solve each piece of the locking puzzle. First, he unlocked the combination wheel on the locker box. Next, he tackled the spinning combination lock like the ones on bicycle locks. He spun the numbers up and down. As he worked to solve the combination, his eyes scanned the rest of the puzzle pausing over each of the two other locking pieces which contained a gate lock and a key lock. The key lock was made to represent the lock on a car trunk. As his eyes scanned this lock, they paused on the license plate containing three letter, a dash, and three numbers. I could almost hear his thoughts as his fingers quickly ran across the number wheels and tried the combination. No luck! He returned to his random combination attempts. Once more his eyes scanned the board and noticed a locker number. Again he returned to the number wheels on the lock and tried the number even though it was a two-digit number and there were three number wheels. After trying to decode the lock for a solid ten minutes, he reluctantly moved on to the other two locks and solved them successfully. Did he give up? No! He actually began to talk about how he couldn’t figure the spinning combination out. He initiated a conversation with me about the various combination possibilities he tried and how he wanted to solve it, write it down and put it in his pocket so he could remember it tomorrow. Wow! In just a few short minutes I learned so much about his problem-solving skills, tenacity and literary knowledge relating to written expression. I tried switching gears and asking if there was anything he wanted to know about me. AHA! I peaked his curiosity. After allowing the necessary “teacher” pause, I realized that the wheels were turning in his brain, but he was overwhelmed. I told him I knew a way that we were the same and I would show him while we played a game. We built his name with magnetic letters. He read his name and checked for accuracy. Now on to my name. His eyes never left the area of the table where we were building our names. We used letters to find out how we were alike and then it happened. Tav locked one of my letters in the trunk of the car on the puzzle. He was quite pleased with himself and I began to plot the afternoon. I praised his ability to create games and asked how long he had been working on this skill. Of course, he had just learned it. I used this back and forth game for the rest of the afternoon to assess his letter knowledge. It worked so well that I was able to assess his numeracy skills as well. By the end of the afternoon I was able to determine that he did not need to point to objects in order to count them. He views himself as a ‘bad’ reader because he can’t read words. He can self-correct when identifying letters as upper and lowercase. There were two winners in his little game that day.