Kayla's Math Blog

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

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

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