Another thing that my teacher does is she is constantly giving positive reinforcement, encouragement, and working hard to build the confidence of her students. The Cantlon article talks about how building student's self-confidence in math can be one of the biggest predictors of success. My mentor teacher works really hard to keep students motivated and feeling confident in math. She has shown me how her assessments have improved over the course of the school year. She is a role model for a math teacher and has the results to prove that differentiated instruction works!
Saturday, January 21, 2012
So far in my placement I have only seen a little bit of math. My placement is at Mt. Hope Elementary School in a first grade classroom. The district currently uses "Harcourt Math" textbooks to teach their students. However, my head teacher is really not a fan of this program. Although she follows the guidelines in the book for what she should be teaching, she really changes how she teaches it to her students. The book is very "textbook" in that it has a lesson (lecture-style) then has a follow up set of problems for students to solve, then has a homework assignment that goes along with it. While this system may work for some, the children in this class have a very low level of understanding of math concepts. Many of them have behavioral problems that take away from learning experiences. Because of this, my mentor teacher will often create experiences or games for the children to take part in that they will stay engaged in. These experiences are much more meaningful to the students and they are therefore picking up on the content better.
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Like Morgan, I have only been able to see a little bit of math so far this semester in my field placement. I got to see a little bit last semester, so I feel like I at least understand the basic system that my mentor teacher likes to use. My mentor teacher uses a textbook called "Investigations", but she doesn't like using it for every unit. Each student does not have their own textbook either. I agree with mentor teacher that textbooks can be overwhelming with the amount of problems on each page and can stress students out. I like that she uses the textbook as a guide, but not as the main source for her lessons. My mentor teacher always starts out with a warm-up, moves on to teaching the material, then follows up with an activity or game. My mentor teacher likes to create hands-on games and activities to keep the students interested and involved. At the end of each unit, my mentor teacher will set up math stations where the students do different review activities for a certain period of time at each station. Like Morgan mentioned, I agree that it is important for students to feel confident when doing math. My mentor teacher gives her students plenty of opportunities to participate and feel involved in the lessons. She also uses the Internet as a resource and is very creative when teaching math. I remember her telling me that math was not one of her favorite subjects to teach, but she makes it work really well. One way that my mentor teacher integrates math into everyday life is by using a money system in her classroom. The students can gain or lose money based on their behavior. If a student acts up during class, the teacher asks the student to "give her five". At the end of the week, my mentor teacher allows the students to "shop" with their money to "buy" things such as candy, pencils, or coupons. Using the money system in her classroom is a great way to integrate math and get students motivated. Overall, as talked about in the Cantlon article, my MT is very aware of her students attitudes. I agree it is important to pay attention to and listen to students in order to be able to teach to your full potential.
ReplyDeleteI am currently placed in Wexford Montessori School and because of the specific curriculum that this school attends to the teacher only uses the GLCEs as an outside guideline for designing her math lessons. Many of these lessons are manipulative based, and much of the time the students have with these manipulatives is a time that they can personally explore with the materials without much teacher aide. This is helpful in that it really aides the children in achieving certain skills such as ordering numbers, designing patterns and one-to-one counting correspondence, however it does not necessarily aide the children in more higher order numerical manipulations such as addition and subtraction.
DeleteUnfortunately unlike Morgan my teacher does not use the same positive reinforcement with math and instead more often tells the children that they are not good at it and they need to practice more because they are unsuccessful. I agree with Morgan and the Cantlon article that a positive self-image in math and self-confidence in the subject can be one of the most important predictors of success in math and in almost every subject. This idea seems to be evident in many children and adults.
One thing that I have seen in my placement that was mentioned in the CGI book was the idea of teaching children the principal of base ten. My MT really tries to get the students to count by 10s. In my MT’s classroom the children are given different sets of beads and chains and all of the beads are grouped in same number sets. There are bead sets of two all the way through ten, and the children seem to be the most comfortable with the twos bead set as well as the tens bead set. These visual and hands-on materials allow the children to physically manipulate these numbers so that they can picture what is actually going on with the math instead of just memorizing a set of numbers. The use of manipulative in my classroom is great and I believe that they really lend themselves well to many mathematical concepts and the children gain much from them.