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Summative Post: Let's Wrap This Up!

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Hello Everyone, Welcome back to my blog spot where we have been talking about different math concepts and abilities I've been learning in the classroom over the last six weeks. Math In Real Life How many times have our students asked us where are we going to use math? When will we use this formula? or Why do we need to learn math? Well after last weeks discussion we learned that math is all around us. I found a really neat example as I have been immersed in it in my job as a cheerleading coach. I never realized that we use so many different math concepts such as counts, angles, stability, aerodynamics, etc. We need to know what is going to work when it comes to throwing others in the air, building pyramids, jumping and creating a routine that involves dance. Here is the example that I shared which is something that is more complicated then I teach but I start from the basics and realized how much more I see math in my routines. PCT Cobras Temptation Intl Open Large
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Visuals, Manipulatives, and White Boards Oh My!

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Welcome back everyone, We need to get our children more involved in math and begin to love math. According to this article  we need to find ways in which to get our students loving math more. In order get children more engaged in math and making them become more fluent in it we need to encourage play. Experiential learning activities in informal contexts, actual or virtual, are designed so that when children play, engage, explore, or interact, they cannot help but learn science and mathematics because they are doing science or mathematics. The way children feel about mathematics profoundly influences what they do with it and how they reflect on it, which in turn influences how knowledge grows and connects.  This week was all about the way in which we have our students learn and become more in love with math by using visuals, manipulatives and technology. Let's start with visuals & manipulatives. Some of our students really need this help when it comes to learning math.
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Rich Task vs Poor Task: How to make math more interesting!

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Hello Everyone, Today I'd like to go into some new ideas of how to make math more interesting for those who either hate math because it seems way to complicated and those who find it boring because they are not being challenged enough. But what is a rich task in math? Good question! After reading this articl e by Jennifer Piggott it came to a definition about what a rich task is. Rich Tasks have a range of characteristics that offer different opportunities to meet the different needs of learners at different times. It involves the support and questioning that is used by the teacher and the roles that learners are encouraged to adopt. A rich task is not rich on its own but in what it is made of. The characteristics of a rich task were as follows: accessible and extendable, one which allows learners to make decisions, involving learners in testing, proving, explaining, reflecting and interpreting, promoting discussion and communications, encouraging originality and inven
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Let's make math easy for everyone!

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Hello fellow teachers (candidates), Today I'd like to delve into the topic of differentiation when it comes to math. We know that as teachers we really need to delve into this notion that we need to accommodate for all learners. Teachers run into this dilemma of how do we accommodate for all our students and make sure that everyone is thriving in some way. How can we as teachers make sure that our strong students are challenged enough while our struggling students don't fall further behind? Good question! This is where differentiation becomes key. We as teachers need to focus on the fact that not all students learn the same or can keep up with each other but we need to offer incentives to keep going for those who struggle and challenges for those who need further enrichment. From the article I read in my class Differentiation Math Instruction  I was able to narrow down 3 important rules when it comes to differentiating:  Focus the instruction needed on key concepts. Lear
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Its all in our message and math madness!

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Hello everyone, Welcome back to my blog on math. Today were here to talk about a couple different things. I'd first like to keep going with the flow of how my last blog ended. I was talking about the growth mindset and how we need to help our students to achieve this. Well lets continue with this conversation and delve into the idea that messages convey some pretty deep meanings to our students. As teachers we wonder why our students change their mindset as soon as we say these three words "you are smart." This is because by telling our students they are smart at something makes them not want to try as hard anymore. We can see that students start to say I will take the easier problem because they know they can do it easily and don't want to risk letting us down by doing something harder. This week we looked into this notion and noticed that the students who we said you did awesome trying vs you are so smart tried harder problems when asked which problem they w
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Math IS for EVERYONE!!!!!!

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Hello my fellow teacher colleagues, Today I'd like to discuss with you something that we've been talking about in our math classes. We know either now or in the near future we will have that child in our classroom who just tells you they really suck at math. They will tell you there is no point trying I just can't. Or they will not try because they know they will fail and they would rather just not put that much effort in. We get to the point where all we can say is.... But really what if we started saying hey you are smart we just need to get you to try. Maybe we can try to change the questions to make them easier to understand. Maybe we can try to add more real life scenarios that our kids would say hey this is funny I can probably do this. Maybe we need brush up on our popular culture characters and stories to be able to add this in to our assignments so it makes kids get more interested in it. Examples:  If your kids are into pokemon here is a link  with di
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Let's Look at Math Games

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Hey Guys, Here we are the end of class and we are exploring different math games that we can integrate into our lessons. I got to delve into the world of Prodigy. Here is the link  to the website. I'm also attaching here a tutorial on how to set your account and use this in the classroom. Prodigy is a math game that incorporates gamification. Students will battle each other or just other computer opponents using math problems. This game is for grades 1-8 and can be interchangable between the grades, math strand, or curriculum expectation. Teachers have the ability to use the dashboard to designate what questions are used during a certain period. If they are dealing with fractions, the teacher can make sure the questions they have to answer is based on fractions. This makes it easier for a teacher to hit any specific & overall expectations for any grade and any strand needed to go over at that particular time in the semester. For example however I can look at grade 4 (jus
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