So what do Trevor Calkins, John Van de Walle, Sharon Taberski and Marie Clay have in common? The first two are great math educator whereas the latter are some of the literacy experts I follow.
Surprise, surprise... current research is showing that the brain processes information by connecting it to ideas in our brains. By MAKING CONNECTIONS. And that's true for both literacy or math - for anything we learn, for that matter.
What does that mean? The more we can connect our learning to other learning in our brains, the better we will retain it. If we want true understanding to take place - things just plain have to make sense. If we want our students to learn we have to GRAB their attention and find out what interests them.
With that and similar ideas I mind, I put together a Christmas math booklet. I tried to integrate as many different mathematical strands as I could.
But as I used it with my kids, I realized I wasn't always taking their level of understanding into account as much as I needed to. Some of the problems were too difficult for most kids at this stage of development. I should have sat down with my Math Recovery book and taken the problems from there instead of from a generic problem solving sheet. First Steps and Math Recovery teach us to find out what students understand and are able to do instead of giving a generic lesson to everyone. Working firsthand with students - even if you only have a few in a grade - it's quite obvious that this true. Now how to effectively teach so I'm targetting all different levels.
I went back and fixed some things. I made the problems for an earlier stage of development plus you could plug in whatever numbers your kids are working at. Winnipeg School Division had some Math/Literature units on their website a while back. They were put together by Math Recovery teachers - problem was, I couldn't find a Christmas one. For some reason, the units are no longer on their website. Good thing I saved them on my computer.
Surprise, surprise... current research is showing that the brain processes information by connecting it to ideas in our brains. By MAKING CONNECTIONS. And that's true for both literacy or math - for anything we learn, for that matter.
What does that mean? The more we can connect our learning to other learning in our brains, the better we will retain it. If we want true understanding to take place - things just plain have to make sense. If we want our students to learn we have to GRAB their attention and find out what interests them.
With that and similar ideas I mind, I put together a Christmas math booklet. I tried to integrate as many different mathematical strands as I could.
But as I used it with my kids, I realized I wasn't always taking their level of understanding into account as much as I needed to. Some of the problems were too difficult for most kids at this stage of development. I should have sat down with my Math Recovery book and taken the problems from there instead of from a generic problem solving sheet. First Steps and Math Recovery teach us to find out what students understand and are able to do instead of giving a generic lesson to everyone. Working firsthand with students - even if you only have a few in a grade - it's quite obvious that this true. Now how to effectively teach so I'm targetting all different levels.
I went back and fixed some things. I made the problems for an earlier stage of development plus you could plug in whatever numbers your kids are working at. Winnipeg School Division had some Math/Literature units on their website a while back. They were put together by Math Recovery teachers - problem was, I couldn't find a Christmas one. For some reason, the units are no longer on their website. Good thing I saved them on my computer.
grade_1_math.pdf |
For the kinders, geometry was a simple angel using different 2D shapes. Decoration plus reading practice!