Hello my Math Methods students!
Thank you to the students who sent in the scope & sequence homework. If yours is outstanding, please email it ASAP.
In addition to your reading and answering the questions as outlined in your syllabus, this post will be an opportunity for discussion on this chapter to see what things stuck you as the most interesting or questions that you had. I should see at least one post from each student per day of class that we are missing. I look forward to reading your discussions and thoughts upon my arrival back to campus.
Thank you for your hard work and please ensure that in addition to this daily chapter discussion that you are also working on your children's literature project. You are choosing a book (buy it, rent it, borrow it) and turning in lessons plans or a unit overview on how, based on standards, you can integrate that children's literature piece into your math classroom.
I learned a lot from the section over rounding. I've not quite known how to teach that in the past and the number line is a great method that creates a simple and helpful visual.
ReplyDeleteI found the rounding methods most interesting. Looking back, i don't remember that i was ever taught how to round with multiplication, but the book says the most common way to round with multiplication is by rounding one number down and the next number up. When the problem is completed, both answers will only be a few away and the correct answer rounded up to its nearest ten will equal what the student should have gotten as rounding with multiplication. This was a new concept to me, so i found it most interesting. You could teach it by using base-ten blocks and trading ones for tens instead of the other way around like the students are used to doing.
ReplyDeleteFractions were the most difficult concept of math for me to learn, This chapter shows many different ways to teach fractions which i think is important because some people may have trouble learning it just one way. My favorite way the book showed wasthe models. You can use the dot cards given to us in class as a model where the students create a square or some kind of shape and fill in a fraction of it. An idea i liked was having the kids build the layout of a playground then give them fractions to separate it into.
ReplyDeleteI also had a lot of difficulty with fractions in school. However, I really liked the "red light, green light" activity where the students play the game a number of times, and the figure out what fraction each student won or lost at the game as a whole. The student get a chance to learn from their own experiences.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to division, I found the "jump to it" activity interesting. I like to see when the students evaluate their work, and learn to adjust their method, or fine-tune them. This is exactly what this activity allows the students to do. They use whatever method to figure how many jumps it will take to get from one number to another. Then, they have to evaluate how reasonable their guess was. This means looking at their process, finding our what works and what doesn't.
ReplyDeleteChapter 15 - students should move from set models for strategies and should learn different reasoning for fractions that will allow them to develop new approaches. Number lines are helpful in developing students' reasoning and emphasis should be placed on reasoning and connection with the visual models.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the other methods of doing division and multiplication presented in chapter 13. I always thought of it as the process we learned. I didn't necessarily applied it to real life when i was learning it. It was a process to me and the process was always done one way. However, in this chapter, my thinking was challenged to see how i would relate it to my future students and to show them what multiplication and division actually look like-not a process, but something extremely important in everyday life. The examples in the book causes one to see what is actually happening when doing multiplication and division and how it works in real life scenarios.
ReplyDeleteI thought Activity 15.10 in chapter 15 was a good strategy to challenge students in estimating fractions. We do that so often in everyday lives, so i think the activity is very beneficial. I honestly felt a little overwhelmed by the chapter. There are so many aspects and angles to teach fractions from. It really challenges my understanding of fractions and how to help others understand fractions. However, I know that, as the chapter pointed out, teaching with all these methods is beneficial in understanding fractions.
ReplyDeleteRounding can be a hard concepts to grasp, but I remember specifically being taught in school the round down method that the book describes, which was where you round one number down and then the next number up. It helped me out a lot when I was first learning and understanding rounding.
ReplyDeleteChapter 15 is a great representation that math can be made more easily grasped whenever you can use a physical model to represent that number, whether its fractions or multiplication or division or whatever a creative and intuitive model can make the grasping of concepts more easily accomplished.
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