Eric Gjerde. (2006, February 23). Pentagonal tiling ideas [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/origomi/103452651
It has been around a week since I've last posted and I do have some interesting updates! In this post, I will focus on two things. First of all, I'll talk about how the video I shared on my last post has impacted me and how I am applying what I've learned every single day. Secondly, I will be talking about what we've done in math class this week and I will be discussing my fractions presentation. Hope you enjoy this week's post!
Class Connections
Now, I would like to start things of by mentioning how math this past week has been super engaging for me. I have been seeing math everywhere since I watched the interesting video that I shared with you in my last post! I'm trying to work my brain these days and visualize mathematics so that I can develop my spatial reasoning. I will have to admit that I am not the most talented when it comes to understanding how objects relate to each other in the 3D space and working on it over the past few days has been interesting! An example of me using this practice would have been during my placement with my associate teacher. She had prepared an activity where students were looking at several circles that were divided by 4, having some of those quarters coloured in purple. The question she asked was for the class to calculate how many purple circles could be made in total. I tried not to count them and started moving the shapes together in my head to get the right answer! It was a Grade 4/5 math question, however, I was happy that I chose to visualize the problem instead of use an algorithm! I can't wait to find my self in another situation where I can fine-tune my spatial reasoning and improve my overall three dimensional insight! I'll definitely keep you posted, math friends.
Fractions Activities
As I also mentioned, this past week in math was when I had the chance to present my fraction's lesson to the math class. It was indeed fractions week and we had a total of 4 teacher candidates present their lessons to small class groups. The goal of the activity was to choose an appropriate lesson from one of our math resource books and present it to our class as if we were doing this activity with junior or intermediate students. The activity I chose was titled, "Dot Paper Equivalencies (3.12)" from the book Van De Walle, J. & Lovin, L. H. (2006). Teaching Student-Centred Mathematics: Grades 5-8. Toronto, Pearson. This activity was primarily catered to Grades 4-5 students and it explored equivalent fractions using an isometric grid paper. Since I was very inspired by spatial reasoning last week, I made sure to choose an activity that used conceptualization and algorithms. I asked my students to draw a symmetrical shape on the grid, divide that grid into either 1/2, 1/3 etc. and being connecting the grid dots in that fractioned area. Then, students began to see how many times they could divide that space using equivalent fractions! So, for example, 1/2 could look like 2/4 then it could look like 4/8 and so forth. I believe the students got to a denominator in the hundreds! I really appreciated how you can both visualize the fractions and use multiplication and division to get to the answers. Overall, I think that the activity went well! My classmates also had excellent lessons. They included matching decimals and fractions together, rolling dice to make 2 fractions then performing an operation to get to a specific answer and lastly comparing fractions to each other.
Next week, I will try to look for more digital photo math problems because applying math in real life scenarios always engages me! Also, I will continue to work on my spatial reasoning game!
By3 4 n0w!
Teddy
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