Math Class

Today was the first day of math and it actually was really good! I learned some fun games to play such as the Rocket Game, in which the teacher calls on a student to pick a number for the top of the rocket and then the teacher rolls a pair of dice and the students try to order numbers correctly. There was another game where a teacher has a rope and a bunch of laminated paper monkey's and the students have to hang the monkey's on the rope (it can represent 0-10 for example) according to the number on the monkey. It looked so fun and creative! I love monkey's too so I definitely want that in my classroom :)

Also, there are some games like place value guessing games where the students have to use logic and reasoning to guess what digit goes into a certain place value. Helen Walters is a wonderful teacher and she told me that it is okay to not feel very creative with maths. I had a little bit of a hard time because I realized there are some major gaps in my learning, especially with fractions, place value, and ratios. We took a diagnostic test from NZ and yeah, the last two bench marks were awful for me. I am going to do my best though and really study up and continue studying up so I can be a great teacher that doesn't harm her students and make them have gaps in their mathematical knowledge.

Right now I am studying up on the frameworks of strategies and knowledge according to levels and what NZ children are expected to do at various periods in their education; it's really interesting and it's great how many of the concepts and words we talked about in MathEd 305 and 306 are still being used now. Math really is about patterns...