newshour dances:
Fact: Doing the running man can help tackle a common fifth-grade learning deficit — number patterns. Here’s how math got it’s groove back…
Brilliant. I need a classroom.
The project Sum Times by artist Aakash Nihalani points out simple math problems in urban environments.
This is the type of work I want to do with students. Harder to do when I don’t have my own class. But I have a small group of students with special needs and I think I will create a project for June in those last weeks of school.
Located on the northern boundary of Madison Square Park, MoMath takes up two floors of a building on East 26th street — including a fairly spacious main floor, where exhibits are showed off to major “wow” factor, as well as a more-cramped lower level. The exhibits target an audience of fourth- through eighth-graders, a demographic considered to be aging out of the city’s children’s museums. On the Friday after Christmas, it was packed.
Walking through the main floor, it seemed immediately clear that the museum had succeeded in making abstract mathematical principles tangible, through interactive displays that involved tasks such as riding a square-wheeled tricycle to experience how square wheels fit into a grooved track to create a smooth ride. My kids’ personal favorite (also my own) was the “Coaster Rollers,” which enable children to ride on a cart that glides over objects shaped like inflated triangles. You’d expect the ride to be bumpy, but because the shapes are isometric, meaning of equal dimensions, the cart glides smoothly over them. My third-grade daughter Clara and I were both interested to learn from a nearby screen that a circle is the simplest isometric shape, but not the only one.
Not gonna lie, I’m kind of excited about this.
Very cool
Math tricks - like the “butterfly”
I originally wrote this as a reblog, and then decided I didn’t want it to seem like I was coming down hard on the poster.
I spend a lot of time working on math. Teaching math is my passion. I participate in ongoing math research in the classroom. And while I understand the attraction of “tricks” like this, they also make me crazy. Because there is no meaning here. This does not build conceptual understanding. Do the students (and teachers) understand why this trick work? Probably not.
Many of you would say it doesn’t matter. The kids just want a quick way to figure it out and move on. But we don’t teach reading and writing this way. We want our students to really understand how to read deeply for meaning, and how to write effectively. If we teach history, we don’t want the students to just memorize dates and events, but to understand the cause and effect of those events. The same could be said for every subject.
So we need to do this in math. I spent two days this week creating math resources for teachers about fractions from K - 12, looking deeply into student misconceptions, and how to address them. The old rhyme “ours is not to wonder why, just invert and multiply” really struck me. At some point students were actually told “don’t think about it, don’t try to understand, just do it”.
What makes me crazy is that this is going on still. So for those of you who teach math, and for those of you embarking on your teaching career, please please please, make a New Year’s committment to teach your students to think critically and passionately about the math they are learning.
This is a fabulous resource and uses the 3 part lesson format which is an essential practice in our board.
How do you teach math? Do you teach procedures? Ask students to explore and try problems and see if they can discover their own procedure? Do you teach math processes?
Math in the Real World
Yesterday, this event happened in my province.
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/CanadaAM/20120329/coin-story-ontario-120329/
Basically, a Brinks transport truck carrying about $5 million in loonies and toonies (Canadian coins for $1 and $2) crashed, spilling its cargo everywhere. Other transport trucks also crashed, including one carrying candy. I figured this was a perfect hook for my students - money and candy. So I developed a math lesson around it.
First we watched all of the videos and read the news report. Then I had them write in their math notebooks for 5 minutes, and record any questions, comments, reactions, wonderings, etc. I made a list of all of their questions. Then I showed them the list of questions I had made before hand. Our questions were things like:
- how many of each coin were there?
- How much did all of the coins weigh?
- If you stacked the coins up, or laid them in a row, how high/long would it be?
- How long did it take to clean up?
- How much money might be missing?
Then I gave them their task. I showed them on an anchor chart the mass, diameter and thickness of each coin. With a partner they had to create a problem and then solve it. Their problem had to include multiplication or division, and at least one decimal number, and use estimation to check their work (we are working on operations with decimals right now). They might have to make some of the numbers up, but they had to be reasonable (for example how many of each coin was in the truck).
Today all of the groups got their problem written. This was a bigger challenge than you might think. They had to make sure they were giving the reader enough information to solve the problem, but not making the problem too easy.
Tomorrow, they will finish solving their problems, and put them on chart paper so we can all discuss them. It was engaging, noisy, and exhausting. But they were motivated to figure out how to multiply and divide decimals.
Lesson Ideas…?
So.. I am now working on teaching my students how to divide decimals by whole numbers. And to be quite frank their long division skills are AWFUL. I assessed them today, only to find very few students showing that they are proficient in the skill. Any suggestions? I have used T-P-S, writing the steps, mnemonic devices, small groups, and modeling. Please help?!
Signal boost.
Division. I find that most students who struggle with what we call “long division” have an incomplete understanding of what exactly division means. Division is so much more than the procedure (divide, multiply, subtract, bringdown, or as my friend calls it “the gazintas - 14 goesinto 29 two times).
So I like to use benchmark and friendly numbers. The procedure most of us learned in school was developed as a short cut before there were calculators, to help mathematicians divide quickly. It doesn’t build knowledge and understanding.
It’s hard to demonstrate this in this format, but I’ll try. Let’s take 4 362 divided by 28. I would work this out, doing a think aloud as I went. I might say
- well I need to figure out how many groups of 28 are in 4 362. If I use friendly numbers, I know that 28 x 100 = 2 800. So I’ve made 100 groups of 28, and used up 2 800. That leaves me 4 362 - 2800 = 1562. I know I can’t make another 100 groups. But I can make 50 groups - 50 x 28 = 1 400. Now I’ve used up 150 groups of 28, and I have 1562 - 1400 = 162. I know 28 x 5 = 140. I’ve got 155 groups of 28, and have 162 - 140 = 22 left. I don’t have enough for another group of 28, so the answer is 155 and 22 remainder.
I realize that this seems clunky and slow typing it out. But it helps the child really build understanding of what actually happens in division.
I would do this with grade 5/6/7 kids.
