Hello to all my mathletes in the house!
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It has been 2 weeks since we last talked about MATH! That is like 336 hours or 20160 minutes without knowing what has been happening in EDBE 8P29! So what has happened you ask? Well, we had 7 brave souls perform their math activities, one game presented by our five lovely groups, EQAO questions assigned to our class, and a few new ideas from our professor- including the famous Traxoline and our favourite kind of math questions, PROBLEM SOLVING!
Math Activities
Everyone that has done their math activities has done an amazing job! Here are some photos of some math activities.
T. Campbell's presentation
T. Filipovic's presentation
C. Fellows' presentation
I have always loved working with shapes! Last year I played with shapes at the YMCA program I worked at with the students I had. They absolutely loved working with shaped and designing animals and figures with the shapes the way this presentation made us do for a question. The presentation added the elements of fractions to it and would 100% use this in a junior grade level!
The fingernail presentation was a cool and unique way of using our fingers as decimals and fractions! It adds an artistic element to mathematics and I know that some students will love that! The different colour fingernails represented a different fraction or decimal (e.g. 2 blue fingernails mean that there is 0.2 or 2/10 of fingernails painted blue). I think this is a fun way to look at decimals and fractions with our hands.
Today was my first day of placement! One of the first activities the students did when they came into class was to do multiplications of 10 and 5 and look for a pattern. Not looking at the pattern aspect, I right away thought of this math tricked/activity showed to us by a fellow Teacher Candidate. I know that any kinesthetic leaner would love to learn this trick! I showed a student this trick and their facial expression was priceless. If you want to fully learn how to do this trick, go to the to Teacher Candidates blog at https://fellowsmathblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/lets-reflect-on-weeks-one-and-two.html, he provides a visual example of how this trick works!
Closing notes:
The EQAO questions, that we and two brave volunteers, need to be solved have been released to us. The one question is a word based question about time and the other question is a problem solving question about surface area. I have already solved both questions and now have to make a master of history student, my girlfriend, and a teacher friend do the question!
During week 3 we did an activity around Traxoline. The whole purpose of this activity was about questioning why we are learning about something- what is the deeper meaning of the question? You can ask any math teacher what is the most frequently asked question in class and I'll comfortably say that 80% would say "why are we doing this?" this the most frequently asked question. We as educators, need to start thinking about why am I designing this lesson plan for my students? Why am I making them learn about this? Again, we will have teachers saying "it is in the curriculum" or "I have an objective why they are learning this"- those kinds of responses will keep our students at a fixed mindset. We will not change our students' mindsets if we do not change our own.
Week four we looked at problem solving questions. We looked at theories by Polya and Doxiadis. We then did a question about a horse that goes like this:
via GIPHY
via GIPHY
It has been 2 weeks since we last talked about MATH! That is like 336 hours or 20160 minutes without knowing what has been happening in EDBE 8P29! So what has happened you ask? Well, we had 7 brave souls perform their math activities, one game presented by our five lovely groups, EQAO questions assigned to our class, and a few new ideas from our professor- including the famous Traxoline and our favourite kind of math questions, PROBLEM SOLVING!
Math Activities
Everyone that has done their math activities has done an amazing job! Here are some photos of some math activities.
T. Campbell's presentation
T. Filipovic's presentation
C. Fellows' presentation
I have always loved working with shapes! Last year I played with shapes at the YMCA program I worked at with the students I had. They absolutely loved working with shaped and designing animals and figures with the shapes the way this presentation made us do for a question. The presentation added the elements of fractions to it and would 100% use this in a junior grade level!
The fingernail presentation was a cool and unique way of using our fingers as decimals and fractions! It adds an artistic element to mathematics and I know that some students will love that! The different colour fingernails represented a different fraction or decimal (e.g. 2 blue fingernails mean that there is 0.2 or 2/10 of fingernails painted blue). I think this is a fun way to look at decimals and fractions with our hands.
Today was my first day of placement! One of the first activities the students did when they came into class was to do multiplications of 10 and 5 and look for a pattern. Not looking at the pattern aspect, I right away thought of this math tricked/activity showed to us by a fellow Teacher Candidate. I know that any kinesthetic leaner would love to learn this trick! I showed a student this trick and their facial expression was priceless. If you want to fully learn how to do this trick, go to the to Teacher Candidates blog at https://fellowsmathblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/lets-reflect-on-weeks-one-and-two.html, he provides a visual example of how this trick works!
Closing notes:
The EQAO questions, that we and two brave volunteers, need to be solved have been released to us. The one question is a word based question about time and the other question is a problem solving question about surface area. I have already solved both questions and now have to make a master of history student, my girlfriend, and a teacher friend do the question!
During week 3 we did an activity around Traxoline. The whole purpose of this activity was about questioning why we are learning about something- what is the deeper meaning of the question? You can ask any math teacher what is the most frequently asked question in class and I'll comfortably say that 80% would say "why are we doing this?" this the most frequently asked question. We as educators, need to start thinking about why am I designing this lesson plan for my students? Why am I making them learn about this? Again, we will have teachers saying "it is in the curriculum" or "I have an objective why they are learning this"- those kinds of responses will keep our students at a fixed mindset. We will not change our students' mindsets if we do not change our own.
Week four we looked at problem solving questions. We looked at theories by Polya and Doxiadis. We then did a question about a horse that goes like this:
A woman bought a horse for $50 and sold it for $60. She then bought the horse back for $70 and sold it again for $80. What do you think was the financial outcome of these transactions? The woman . . .
a)Lost $10 b)Earned $10 c) Lost $20 d) Earned $20
e) Came out even f) Other (Describe)
Explain your reasoning.
As a group, we solved the problem with mental math and by using pictures! the whole purpose of this activity was to show us that we can all get to the same answer by different methods. This is an approach I saw today in my placement, where my associate teacher showed the students the mental math way and the visual aid way to get to the final answer. My associate teacher even said, "it doesn't matter how we get there, it is as long as we reach the same destination." That is a mindset we are starving for at Teacher College.
Remember to keep trying and working hard with your mathematics!
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