Bed with Slats

      This quilt is a part of Caleb Shaw's art collection, and this particular art piece is called "Bed with Slats".  The quilt is a part of a collection from the 1800's, created by enslaved African Americans in the US.  One thing I really enjoyed about this piece is that it was created by enslaved African American women, with very little education.  However, this quilt is a supreme work of art, mathematics, and beauty.  Although these women did not experience formal educations, they had to be very intelligent and creative to make a quilt such as this.  It's empowering, since women back then were not allowed to be mathematicians, but they had mathematic abilities.

        I thought that this quilt art piece had a place in my mathematics classroom, because I could show them how they could be quilt mathematicians too.  I could have them identify shapes and the areas of them (using a real quilt or a print out).  Additionally, the students could practice creating a quilt using little shape pieces and I could sew it for them and keep it in the classroom.  This kind of activity could make them feel connected to such an old practice and make them feel like young mathematicians.

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New Generation Math

Why Common Core Math Problems Look So Weird

The youtube video wouldn't show up to embed, but here is the link!  My friend recently tagged me in this on Facebook, so I know that it is getting shared around and this is a question a lot of people have.  Parents throughout the US, who often did fine at their kids' grade level, can't seem to do their kids' homework.  This is because of Common Core! The video explains that while we used to learn the quick tricks to solving math problems, we are now working towards instilling a deeper understanding of math problems and why these tricks work.  Anyone in Middle Grades Math can attest to our learning of these newer methods in our current classes.  Beyond that, I believe that the common core standards lead students to have higher level thinking in all areas.  There is a much larger focus nowadays on math word problems, so that students can see the realistic use of mathematics outside of the classroom.  It's important that literacy as well as math literacy be addressed in our classroom in order for our students to succeed in a modern classroom.

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Making Great Teachers Fantastic

        I really enjoyed this video for a number of reasons.  First of all, I really liked that she was already a good teacher to begin with.  We often hear about how a teacher is doing a bad job if they do this or that and need to make corrections.  She wasn’t making corrections because she was doing a poor job, she was simply improving herself even more. I also enjoyed that the techniques the teacher was recommended to use were very clearly stated.  She wasn’t told “You need more literacy practice in the classroom”. Instead, she was told to create vocab activities, have more interaction with the board, and have different activities for different tables and skill levels in the classroom. Additionally, the video showed her before a class, during a class, doing the meeting with the expert, preparing for the class a week later (and the subsequent challenges/strides), conducting the class, and reviewing with the expert as follow-up.  I felt like I really got to see every element of the story and understand how and why these were effective in the classroom. There were two strategies that really stood out to me that I would have never thought of on my own.  The first was to attach relatable images to vocab words.  The students could see boiling pasta for evaporation, for example.  The vocab cards added to that, since she was familiarizing the students with a common learning strategy for high school and college students.  I also would have never thought about the importance of having students write on the board. It’s exciting to see them come up and feel more special than if they had just called out something, and, as they said, it does keep them engaged since they may be called up. When teachers are writing on the board, they often call on students they know will answer correctly. This strategy could be used to get students ready to go up whether they were meaning to or not, and it wouldn’t take long for this to have the effect of having students more comfortable making mistakes and learning from them in your classroom environment.

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Text Set Topic

When looking for my text set standard, this particular standard caught my eye.  I really liked it because often students struggle when the numbers turn into letters, and I felt that many students may think that letters are for language arts and numbers are for math, but that is not the case!  I also liked that the standard had subsets and more directions that I could take this text set in.  I know that this beginning of algebra math is really difficult for students, and I'm excited to see all the different ways I can teach it, as well as what other educators, mathematicians, and so on think about this topic.  The standards I am using are below.  Main points include the general idea of having expressions where letters stand for numbers, and in 2c, they discuss the use of these equations in real world problems.  I'm sure that this text set will make a wonderful addition to my classroom one day!

MGSE6.EE.2 Write, read, and evaluate expressions in which letters stand for numbers. MGSE6.EE.2a Write expressions that record operations with numbers and with letters standing for numbers. For example, express the calculation “Subtract y from 5” as 5– 𝑦.
MGSE6.EE.2b Identify parts of an expression using mathematical terms (sum, term, product, factor, quotient, coefficient); view one or more parts of an expression as a single entity. For example, describe the expression 2(8 + 7) as a product of two factors; view (8 + 7) as both a single entity and a sum of two terms.
 MGSE6.EE.2c Evaluate expressions at specific values for their variables. Include expressions that arise from formulas in real-world problems. Perform arithmetic operations, including those involving whole-number exponents, in the conventional order when there are no parentheses to specify a particular order (Order of Operations). For example, use the formulas 𝑉 = 𝑠3 and 𝐴 = 6𝑠2 to find the volume and surface area of a cube with sides of length 𝑠 = 1/2.

Resource Blog 3

www.mathteaching.org/

This resource is a general website to help both new and experienced math teachers in the classroom.  It doesn’t just serve as a resource for worksheets, or even as a resource for just teachers.  They have tons of links that can take a math teacher through a whole lesson with lots of interactive add-ons, and they also have great links to assign as homework or help for struggling students.  The interactive materials provided for students in the classroom and at home are all really helpful with the students gaining mathematic literacy while learning the concepts through the different programs.

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Chapter 6: Should we even read textbooks? And if so, how?

This chapter had some really great tips on how to help students read through a textbook, and possible strategies to have them do less or no reading in the textbook.  I was disappointed that so many of the strategies wouldn’t work well in the math classroom.  For example, they talked about book clubs and Jigsaw reading, which I really don’t see as effective strategies with a math textbook.  There is potential with the vocabulary word sorting strategy and I really did connect to the material asking us to get the students out of the textbook.  I recently posted a TED Talk where he took a problem from a textbook and created a real video of it happening! That is so much more effective than just assigning seven pages a night so they can get through it all.  I think students can learn a lot better in a classroom where a teacher is dedicated to teaching outside of the textbook, in words the students can understand. Yes, they should learn the math vocabulary, but that does not mean that it isn’t useful for them to hear something in normal words first and begin to understand how math vocabulary connects to it after.  I could see myself putting vocabulary words and textbook definitions up on the board, and having students help me break down the definition until everyone can understand it.  This strategy could help them throughout the unit as well as later in life when they come across words and definitions that they don’t understand.
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Literacy in the Math Classroom

10 Ways Literacy Can Promote A Deeper Understanding Of Math

This link has very helpful tips for using literacy in the math classroom. I loved how interactive many of these were, and how they encouraged the students to think through their thought process and share.  One suggestion that is often forgotten was to have students write down why they got a problem wrong and the correct way to do it.  There were multiple suggestions that addressed students not just sloppily writing down what they need to in order to get there, but instead writing or voicing a step by step process in a way that others could understand.  When students are put in a teacher role, they are able to learn things to a higher level so that they are able to explain them to their peers.

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