Teaching common factors

The child's mind is absolutely incredible. After this week's class, it's quite astonishing to see the different methods to multiply, divide, and add whole numbers. Prior to this week's class, I have always believed that the traditional method was the only method. There is so much more than what I was taught in elementary school. I'm happy to see that students have more choices on how to solve a question!

Besides this, my partner and I did a micro lesson/presentation and taught the class how to find common factors. We used the following activity from the textbook Making Math Meaningful, "Peter's dad wanted to give his sons timbits (it was originally cookies). Peter got 30 timbits and his younger brother, Billy, got 18 timbits. His dad wanted to make sure his sons got the same amount of timbits in a bag. How many were in a bag?" We brought timbits and ten sandwich bags for each group in the class and allowed them to work together to figure out the answer.

After a couple minutes of group work, both groups were successful in finding the correct answer - which is 6. I really enjoyed doing this lesson since we were able to bring realistic manipulatives (that related to the question) rather than blocks. I believe this made the lesson more enjoyable for the students. They were able to work with their classmates and, of course, enjoy some treats after the lesson.

After this presentation, the teacher gave each table a set of cubes. We were to pick two colours and give them each a value as an incentive for students (ex: red meant 10 points and green meant 5 points). Once a value was determined, we were to collaborate with another group and decide on a value for our colours and count how many points we had. Once decided, we were to all collaborate together as a class on a value.

This was quite interesting since we couldn't quite agree on what each colour should be valued at. The teacher was right - it was quite hard to give up on your idea after being set on it. Because of this, there was difficulty on setting a fixed value.

It's important to be open-minded towards other members' ideas. Without open-mindedness, collaborations will continue to be difficult and it will be near impossible to find a proper connection with your team members.

Learning it all over again...

Last week's class was, once again, quite interesting to say the least. During class, our professor thought of a clever way to make us look through the Ontario curriculum. She managed to do this by creating a Jeopardy game and did this by splitting the class into groups. Indeed, this made us more knowledgeable of the curriculum but it also made us want to learn it - especially in a competitive way. Unfortunately for my team, we lost but that's okay.

During my first week of placement at Regina Mundi Catholic Elementary School, there were two whole periods of math. This was good for me since I still need to re-familiarize myself with the math work. The class was in the middle of a unit where they had to find the common difference by using a T-chart. A difficult challenge was given to the class - one that I found quite difficult as well. The students were to create two different formulas to find the number. I'm still not quite sure if it's called common difference since they were to find the pattern/difference between the set of numbers.

I found it to be amazing that the teacher only used the Smartboard to teach the math lesson. He used multiple colours to distinguish what he was writing. Here's an example of the work from the class:

My associate professor taught me a really good lesson that teaches me to be a better math educator. The number rule, he states, is to not know all the answers in your lesson. If you know all the answers, then it's not as fun for the students. If you don't know the answer, you and your students will all work together to figure out the answer - it promotes teamwork and allows for more engagement in the lesson. I look forward to integrating this into my future math lessons.

So... what's BEDMAS again?

Hi, my name is Catherine Vo and I am a teacher candidate at Brock University. In this blog, I will chronicle my journey to become a better math educator. As a humanities student, I have struggled with math or anything that has to due with numbers. The only time I have ever used math after high school is when I am calculating my tuition or finding out what the price is after a discount. Silly, right?

So far, the math class has been quite enjoyable. To be honest, I found this to be surprising. During the first session, we had to use four 4's to figure out how to get the numbers 1-20.This was extremely challenging yet fun. The class managed to get a majority done. Below is an image of our work.



After this activity, we were asked to draw what we imagined as a math genius. Since I was in grade school, I remember seeing a "math wizard." Unfortunately, this was the only image I could think of when asked to draw one on the spot.



It's very clear I am not a good at drawing. During the duration of the course, I hope to be able to become a better math educator and become better at drawing a math genius (of course).