Week 5 Reflection

This week in class we had more student presentations. We talked about integers, more specifically the order of operations of integers, multiplying and dividing integers, and perfect squares. 

multiplication and division of integers. 

First we looked at the multiplication of integers. As usual, I was fairly lost in the subject, since I don't remember most of the math that I learned in elementary school. Thankfully, the textbook and my peers explain things very well, so I was able to comprehend what was happening. My peers always give great examples of multiple manipulatives that we can use with our students to help make problems clearer. This week we were shown how to use number line charts, integer tiles, and counters to help solve problems involving integers. We also went over what product and quotient means. 

• product - the answer when 2 or more numbers are multiplied together 
• quotient - the result obtained by dividing one quantity by another

Then, we went over the order of operations, which doesn't solely apply to working with integers. This is one of the things I actually remember learning in school; BEDMAS or PEDMAS, which stands for brackets/parenthesis, exponents, divide, multiply, add, subtract. We use this when a math problem has more than one operation in it. We talked about how you can divide or multiply first, since it does not affect the solution, but other than that you must follow the correct order of BEDMAS for all other operations. We also went over the revision of powers, for example, 2^(2^2) = 16. This was helpful for me, so I can explain to my students how to figure these types of problems out. 

One of the things I enjoy in this class is finding ways to use math in everyday life. I like finding examples of using math in everyday uses, to prove to students that knowing math is actually useful (contrary to what they believe). Last week we talked about decimals and a real world example was adding money/change. This week we were talking about integers, so the real world example was temperature. 

Woolley, E. © 2015

One of the other things we looked at this week was number sense and numeration: perfect squares and square roots. As a refresher, perfect squares are any number that is the product (multiplication) of 2 equal integers. Square roots are the reverse side of perfect squares; they are a value that can be multiplied by itself to give the original number. We looked at a fun math problem related to perfect squares and square roots. It's called the Locker Problem, and it is explained here. We expect students to be able to use the square root button on their calculators in order to solve these problems, but this problem actually makes them think. I found this porblem challenging, but fun at the same time. It was really educational and I hope to challenge my students with it. Finally, a fun fact that one of our peer teachers shared with us is square root day: 04/04/16, or April 4, 2016.

We looked at two fun math parody videos, that proved how some people enjoy math, and can have fun with it. They made our whole class laugh, a room full of adults and teacher candidates, so I'm sure a room full of elementary students would love watching this, and hopefully be inspired to make their own, fun math video. 

Science and Math War

What is the value of Pi?