Week 3 Reflection

In class we had people instruct on Whole Numbers. We read chapter 10 of the textbook, which was also describing Whole Numbers. My classmates reviewed different strategies to teach addition, estimation, and place values. 

One of the methods I found very helpful was grouping numbers together and rounding in order to add large numbers. I found this very helpful to add large numbers like 345+138. We added the hundreds together first to get 400, then the tens to get 70, and the ones to get 13, to find a total of 483. I think this is a good strategy because students get intimidated by large numbers and this really helps to simplify things for them. 

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These place value riddles were quite informative and actually fun to do. They challenged me to think and I was really pleased with myself when I was able to figure out the answer. I think this was a good activity and I would definitely use this in my own class to confirm that students know place values.

Woolley, E. © 2015

This image shows how numbers can be grouped together. This really caught my attention and really opened my eyes to how numbers come together. I highlighted some of the patterns that I noticed in particular. The pink indicates groups of 5, the blue represents groups of 4. There are many other patterns to this image, like the circles representing prime numbers. I will definitely use this in my class room to help students visual numbers and their patterns, and not just as a number. These groupings will definitely help with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. This is a really good strategy that I hope to teach in my class one day. 

Week 2 Reflection

After the second session of my Mathematics class, I still have mixed feelings about math. I’ve never been particularly fond of math. I was pretty good at it in elementary school and I thought I was good at it, but by the time I was in grade 9 math, I realized I was not very good at math. I was always really lost and confused in my math classes in high school. After grade 11 I thought I was done with math classes. When I was registering for classes at Brock Education, and I saw that one of my mandatory classes was a math, I was really worried. I’m still a little confused in this class, but I’m hoping that by the end of this course I will be able to understand math much better, so that I will be able to instruct my students.

I think that being a good math student means finding different ways to solve problems, rather than just one solution. The same thing with being a good math teacher, you should use different methods to teach students how to problem solve. As a good math teacher you should let students find ways to solve problems, instead of just giving them a formula for them to plug in the information to find the answer. We did something similar in the second session of our math class. Our prof asked us to find the answer to the question “how many handshakes will 30 people make if they all shake each other’s hands?” He didn’t give us a formula, he just asked us to solve the problem. Different students used different methods, using blocks, using different calculations.

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 My group modelled the problem by getting the 6 of us to shake each other’s hands. We found that if there are 6 people, then there will be 5 handshakes. From this, we were able to calculate how many handshakes 30 people will make.

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One of the optional articles we were given to read for this session led to me finding this article, which really peaked my interest. It talked about how math is poorly represented in tv and movies. This is probably one of the reasons that kids don't like math. It is either shown in a negative way and so the kids view it as a bad thing, or it viewed as hard problems, but is actually fairly simple  (like on Numb3rs), so that kids think that math is not difficult but then they can't figure it out in class. I think one thing teachers should teach in the classroom, is that math is not a bad thing, and it really is used in everyday life. 

Introduction

Hey all,
My name is Ellena and I'm 22 years old. I graduated this year from the University of Waterloo with a major in French, and a double minor in Applied Language Studies and Religious Studies. I've always wanted to become a teacher ever since I was a little kid. I hope to become a French teacher, teaching Core French in an elementary school in the near future. My grandfather, my aunt, and my uncle are all teachers, so I guess teaching runs in the family. I hope to make it through these next two
years without too much difficulty with the coursework. I'm particularly worried about this Math course, because I've never been too good at math work. Even simple math like addition and subtraction takes me a while to figure out without a calculator, so I'm hoping that this course will help to improve my own math skills, but also help me instruct students how to overcome their struggles with math problems.

I'll introduce myself a little more. I like to hangout with my friends and my boyfriend on my free time. If I'm not with them, then I'm most likely lounging around my room watch Netflix. I like to cook and bake, but I often find that I'm too busy to be in the kitchen, so I hope to find more time to get back into cooking. I'm very active on many social medias; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are my main outlets to connect with friends. I'm obsessed with check my newsfeeds to find out what my friends and the rest of the world are up to. I'm not too sure what else would be relevant to let you guys know, so I guess for now I'll leave it at that, and hopefully I'll share more as the course goes on. Thanks for reading, I'll leave you with a selfie from my last Instagram post. Enjoy!

Woolley, E. © 2015