Wednesday, January 28, 2009
CGI Ch. 1-3
I think of the initial ideas that I took away from these chapters was the statement that children learn in their own way that is uniquely different from adults. One way this was demonstrated was by giving examples of three different ways to look at the same math problem that was set up differently. Since I have had a lot of experience with math I see all of the problems as essentially the same whether I am adding 3 plus 5 or 5 plus 3. Every child can approach the math problem differently and teachers must be sensitive to that. In chapter 3 when the book detailed some of the various strategies that students use to solve problems I was a little bit surprised that the book said that children pick up on most of these strategies naturally and without being taught them. In my placement class my students are working on regrouping and a lot of them use the direct modeling strategy. They have a ones/tens/hundreds chart that they use with cubes and they will count each cube to come up with the answer. I remember in MTH 201 learning about partitive and measurement division (I think those were the correct terms) so some of that was coming back to me while I was reading about the difference that students perceive when they are splitting things into groups or when they have groups and they are trying to find the whole. There is so much more that goes into selecting appropriate math problems for the students in your class that it appears at first. In the video that we watched in class last week the teacher purposely picked problems where it was times 5 each time to see if the students noticed the pattern. As teachers it is important that we think about the different ways that students can approach a math problem when we create it so that it is easier to anticipate how they might go about solving it. The idea of having discussions in math seems so reasonable I'm amazed that I was never exposed to it really at all K-12. I hope to spend more time learning about how to implement discussions into my math classroom to further enrich my students learning.
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Anne,
ReplyDeleteThe specific topics that you seemed to pinpoint in our readings of CGI chapters 1-3 were also topics that stood out to me. I think it is astounding how many different ways there are to approach and/or write word a problem. I have never considered the face that the wording of a problem may make it more or less difficult for a child. This new knowledge that we have will be an excellent resource to use when dealing with children within a classroom setting who drastically range in ability level. For instance, we now know that lower functioning students would probably be best suited for a "result unknown" problem while more advanced students could progress to "change unknown" and eventually to "start unknown" equations. After reading through our initial learning goals it seemed like all three of us were very concerned about individualizing instruction for students performing on diverse academic levels. I think our new knowledge about problem usage and wording will be of great assistance and allow us to vary our level of instruction while still applying the same mathematical content to all students.