Week 9 Reflection
Our topic this week was teaching the strand of measurement. A classmate of mine ran an activity with me around the skill of estimation and comparing measurements. He had us line up according to our height, and then provided us with a standard plastic water bottle and challenged us to estimate how many water bottles tall each of us was. Our method was the person in our group who was the tallest estimated his own height first, and then each person afterwards estimated based on the approximate difference between them and the next tallest person to determine their guess. We took two very different approaches to determining our actual heights, some of us measured our height and the water bottle height and divided them to get a ratio, while others held the bottle to them and moved it up their body to approximate their height.
This strand was of interest to me as it is the strand that my associate teacher has told me I will be teaching during my first teaching block of math. Although I will be teaching more complex measurement concepts for a grade 7 class, measurement remains a strand involving a lot of relationships between concepts (ie. the area of a triangle is the area of a rectangle divided by 2). Getting students to connect these concepts together will be crucial in helping them succeed.
This made me ask the question, how can I physically show students these relationships? As the common theme thus far in this course has been visualisation, and providing tangible ways for students to see concepts. When I was in grade 7, I always remember my teacher giving us an activity to show this to us. She provided us with tangrams of rectangles, squares, triangles etc. and the outlines of shapes specified for learning in the curriculum (trapezoids and parallelograms in particular) and irregular shapes. She challenged us to create formulas for solving the irregular and curriculum shapes by fitting the other shapes together within the outlines. This helped us to visually see how other shapes combine to create new ones, and visually represents how the teacher came up with the formulas she was trying to teach us.
This week I had the opportunity to teach a math lesson to my placement class as practice for my internship. Although this lesson was on data management, it gave me a chance to implement some of the ideas we learned in class. Specifically, I was able to make some connections to our Making Math Meaningful text, it gave me some real world uses of our inquiry focused classwork thus far. This was evident when, through emphasis of growth mindset and "mistakes are expected, respected and corrected" and encouragement of inquiry based questioning, I was able to get multiple IEP students to fully engage in my lesson when they typically don't exhibit this level of engagement with my associate. This was a promising start as the methods discussed in the textbook were clearly effective in keeping student engagement and them excited about math.
This strand was of interest to me as it is the strand that my associate teacher has told me I will be teaching during my first teaching block of math. Although I will be teaching more complex measurement concepts for a grade 7 class, measurement remains a strand involving a lot of relationships between concepts (ie. the area of a triangle is the area of a rectangle divided by 2). Getting students to connect these concepts together will be crucial in helping them succeed.
This made me ask the question, how can I physically show students these relationships? As the common theme thus far in this course has been visualisation, and providing tangible ways for students to see concepts. When I was in grade 7, I always remember my teacher giving us an activity to show this to us. She provided us with tangrams of rectangles, squares, triangles etc. and the outlines of shapes specified for learning in the curriculum (trapezoids and parallelograms in particular) and irregular shapes. She challenged us to create formulas for solving the irregular and curriculum shapes by fitting the other shapes together within the outlines. This helped us to visually see how other shapes combine to create new ones, and visually represents how the teacher came up with the formulas she was trying to teach us.
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| Lakeshore Learning. (2017). Tangrams [Online Image]. Retrieved from https://www.lakeshorelearning.com/product/productDet.jsp?productItemID=1%2C689%2C949%2C371%2C894%2C353&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=1408474395181113&bmUID=1510855543202 |
This week I had the opportunity to teach a math lesson to my placement class as practice for my internship. Although this lesson was on data management, it gave me a chance to implement some of the ideas we learned in class. Specifically, I was able to make some connections to our Making Math Meaningful text, it gave me some real world uses of our inquiry focused classwork thus far. This was evident when, through emphasis of growth mindset and "mistakes are expected, respected and corrected" and encouragement of inquiry based questioning, I was able to get multiple IEP students to fully engage in my lesson when they typically don't exhibit this level of engagement with my associate. This was a promising start as the methods discussed in the textbook were clearly effective in keeping student engagement and them excited about math.
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