From class this past Monday, I learned that by doing something like posting a review sheet online for everyone to do two problems and comment on one another's answers, students are challenged in a way that makes them more responsible to one another and especially responsible for their own learning. It also adds a slight element of struggle, which I've noticed the right amount of "slight" struggle can really help learning. I learned there are great viable options for math journaling; there are super fun ways to incorporate learning about measurement, mean, and range; and, there can be quite high-order mathematical thinking involved when working with those elements and tanagrams.
A question I have right now is if the group task we did on Monday, making our tanagram giraffes twice as big, was a group-worthy task, right? Because it helped a whole lot to have more than one of us working on it and because mathematical tasks involving changing size like that do come up in the real world?
Implications for my classroom would be that I see the direct relevance of using math journaling, tanagrams, and fun activities, all in every grade, all advancing learning to deeper levels. I think this seems so plausible because they all help me with my mathematical thinking as an adult and can see how they all help in the 1st/2nd grade classroom I'm in right now. Even in this class of young students they have something called Math Notebooks where they respond reflectively to written mathematical prompts like journals where they explain their thinking.
A question I have right now is if the group task we did on Monday, making our tanagram giraffes twice as big, was a group-worthy task, right? Because it helped a whole lot to have more than one of us working on it and because mathematical tasks involving changing size like that do come up in the real world?
Implications for my classroom would be that I see the direct relevance of using math journaling, tanagrams, and fun activities, all in every grade, all advancing learning to deeper levels. I think this seems so plausible because they all help me with my mathematical thinking as an adult and can see how they all help in the 1st/2nd grade classroom I'm in right now. Even in this class of young students they have something called Math Notebooks where they respond reflectively to written mathematical prompts like journals where they explain their thinking.
