A Penny For Your Thoughts

A Penny For Your Thoughts
Something to contemplate as you study to be a teacher

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Math: Chapters 1 and 13

I may sound like the biggest nerd with this next statement: I love Math and hope to one day teach it! I have enjoyed math ever since I was a little girl. I used to sit at my dad's desk in third grade and ask my papers to make up a multiplication speed test for me to practice taking for school the next day : ) Even though there are positives and negatives to giving speed tests, every child is different in the way they learn math. We began to discuss in class how some people say "I am just not a math person". In my eyes when I hear this I hear a voice of someone that didn't have a motivating and encouraging instructor when it came to math. Everyone is capable of learning math, but it lies in the teacher's responsibility to instill the motivation in their students to learn it.

Even though the above statements are opinion and a little off topic from the reading the reading really motivated me to say the statement and to want to learn more ways to teach math to all students. I like how the chapter readings broke up the different activities into categories (developmental, practice, application, and assessment). I think that this is an awesome way to look at the ways we teach math and to remember to base our activities off of this model to make them as productive as possible at meeting the learning objectives. I also like how it broke assessments down and all the many ways teachers can assess. It is hard to break the habit of always giving paper and pencil tests to check for understanding and application, at least I think it is because I feel this is always what my teachers did growing up. For me, and the love I have for math, I cannot wait to apply these concepts to my classroom.

Of course my favorite part of the reading were all of the examples for practice activities. I really like to see students getting up and moving around especially kindergarteners and first graders. They never seem to want to sit in their seats anyway and definitely lose interest quickly if they are made to do this all day. The lessons that required the students to get up and move around such as match me, round we go, and line up. I am definitely going to use these in my classroom one day. I have found in the past year while being in the classrooms that the more the kids get to get up and actively engage in an activity the better behaved they are and the more they learn. My favorite of all the examples was round we go. I could almost see my kindergarteners doing this with shapes as I was reading. Again, being able to apply reading a text to real life examples really brings it into focus for me and motivates me even more as a teacher, because I know one day I will be able to use all these fun activities in my own classroom : )

1 comment:

  1. I'm soo glad that their are teachers out there that are so passionate about math as you! :-) I never had that teacher. Too bad you couldn't have been her!

    I love anything that allows students to get up and out of their seats to "play" with their learning. Math is one of those subjects that you can do that more so than reading....

    The class teaching math that I took as a undergraduate gave me a lot of good ideas such as using bell ringers, and math munchies! So nice to use food for anything! ;-) It is hard to break away from the pencil paper math lessons. But I think that if you can teach the objectives first and then teach the lesson by reinforning it with hands on activites your students will learn more and growth better as little math people.

    As for the "not being a math person" I have grown to hate it! SErioulsy hate it!!! What can I do to change my attidude so that I will not put a bad taste in my student's mouth for math?

    I wish I had you for my math teacher! :-)

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