Skip to main content

Journal Summary: Facilitating Student-Created Math Walks

     I read the article “Facilitating Student-Created Math Walks” written by Min Wang, Candace Walkington, and Koshi Dhimgra and published in the September 2021 issue of Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12. Before reading this article I had never heard of the concept of a math walk. A math walk allows students to get outside the classroom and find math in everyday life. After reading this, I realized that I have done something similar to a math walk in my high school geometry class when we were given a list of geometric shapes and angles and we has to walk around the school and take pictures of them. The article explains the five steps teachers can follow to design each stop in a math walk. The first step is to observe the space, then pose questions to the students to get them thinking and allow them to ask questions, then connect those questions to STE(A)M fields to help the students connect it to outside mathematics. After all the stops are planned out, the teacher can put all the stops together and format the makes sense and finally do a final read-through of your math walk to make sure you have a wide variety of questions. I plan on doing a math walk in my future special education classroom to show students how math connects to everyday life and why it is important to learn these mathematical concepts and skills. I could do a math walk with my future students of any age. If I teach elementary-aged students, I would love to do a math walk around the school playground to show them math is even involved in playing. If I teach high school-aged students, I would do a math walk that involves different jobs they could have in the future and to show them that all jobs require some math knowledge.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Math Applet Review #1

  https://www.nctm.org/Classroom-Resources/Illuminations/Interactives/Grouping-and-Grazing/   For my first Math Applet Review, I chose the Illuminations (NCTM) website and quickly realized there are way too many activities to review in one blog post so I will be specifically focusing on the game called Grouping and Grazing. This game is designed for PreK through 2nd grade and works best on tablets and laptops. The student’s objective of the game is to help the alien spaceship move cows into corrals by counting, adding, or subtracting. This activity helps children learn grouping, tally marks, and place value. As they master counting, they can move on to adding and subtracting two-digit numbers. One thing I really like about this game is it can be used for students who are working on counting by 5s and 10s and then can be differentiated for students working on addition, then subtraction with a simple click of a drop-down menu. I want to teach special education and I will have a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grade Level Curriculum Reflection

     Through this year-long curriculum, I learned how important it is for teachers to plan ahead. There are so many standards that need to be covered throughout the year and the standards all vary in the length of time it will take to teach and for the students to master. Teachers need to plan for this and read through all the standards at the beginning of the year to make sure they have time to get to everything. I have been in math classes before (more in middle school) that seem to be so rushed at the end of the year which could have been due to the teacher’s lack of a year-long curriculum plan. Obviously, other things could have come up or lessons took longer than my teacher thought, but it still reminds me of the importance of having a plan because I know how stressed I was when I had to learn concepts too quickly and didn't have time to master them before the tests. I also learned how important it is to review standards from the previous grade because they tie in so...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ch 5:Pose Purposeful Questions

   Posing purposeful questions reminds me of the third CCSSM Standard which is Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others because teachers should pose purposeful questions to gauge student understanding and students communicate their understanding back to the teacher through their arguments of why they got the solution they did. There are five types of purposeful questions teachers ask students which are all used for different purposes. The first type of purposeful question is gathering information, which teachers use when want students to recall basic facts or definitions (mostly things that are memorization). This is a question used to assess students because it usually has a right and wrong answer and can help the teacher gauge whether or not the student understands. The second type of purposeful question is probing thinking, which is used when teachers want students to explain, elaborate, or clarify their thinking and reasoning and why they came up wit...
Post a Comment
Read more