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

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

Ch 4: Build Procedural Fluency from Conceptual Understanding

A conceptual understanding of math is essential for students to be successful in math classes throughout their life. To me, conceptual understanding is the basics of math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, equalities, etc), why these concepts work, how they work together, and then being able to remember and draw from these concepts in more complex problems. In order for students to gather conceptual understanding, they need to be willing and ready to learn and they also need to believe in themselves and their intelligence. The teacher's role is to be the expert but to guide students toward these understandings and not simply state them like facts, or else students will memorize them and not understand why these concepts work and why they are important in the future.  Procedural fluency is the ability to use equations, representations, manipulatives, etc to solve a simple problem. The word simple is relative to the child’s grade level and also their academic level. Fo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Learning Centers Reflection

I enjoyed creating my learning centers! I liked the format we used because it was easy to organize all my thoughts and made sure I thought out everything that I would need to do. I made my learning centers around games to make it fun for the students while they are also practicing addition skills. My learning centers are designed for students to practice addition after they have previously had more explicit instruction. This will also help the students master their math facts and be able to solve addition problems quickly. I liked that I got to be creative while doing this project and that it is something I can use in my classroom in the future. I also designed these learning centers to be able to be changed for different grade levels so students could practice subtraction or multiplication instead of addition without much extra work for the teacher. I liked that two of my learning centers were about adding numbers between 1 and 10 and my third learning center was about adding money so...
Post a Comment
Read more