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.
Using manipulatives in elementary mathematics is extremely important for students to gain a conceptual understanding of a variety of mathematical topics. It can be difficult for teachers to determine if students can transfer their understanding from manipulatives to other situations but this is why teachers need to plan time to have students learn the concepts with the manipulatives and then give the students time to solve the problems and only use manipulatives to check their work before finally removing the manipulatives and assessing the student’s knowledge because they won’t usually have these manipulatives in higher grades and outside of the classroom. In order to assess this growth and understanding, teacher observation and questioning are crucial. Teachers need to walk around the classroom or pull individual students or small groups and have students demonstrate their thinking with and without manipulatives. Manipulatives are also great because they help students improve their
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