Summary of the Class

Now that the semester is winding down, I thought a summary of the class would be appropriate. We have covered a lot of ground thus far. I can say my mathematical foundation has definitely become more solid. I have been challenged in ways that did at times make me feel uncomfortable only because I had never been exposed to learning/teaching in such a manner. I now appreciate the course and the ways the content was presented to me. (I only wish all my methods courses reached this level of depth).

New Insights and Their Implications

Watching my peers present their LPUs in class has been really helpful for my mathematical understanding. Each lesson provides a variety of different methods to teach a single concept. By observing these lessons I am gaining new insight of a concept; in addition, I am now better able to teach the concept. I realize not all of my students are going to learn the same way. Therefore, by knowing how to teach one concept multiple ways, I am preparing myself to better teach my students. I look forward to the rest of the lessons to come!

Summary and Synthesis

(I emailed this one too you in October and I am not posting it on the blog)

This course has also opened my eyes to a new light of math. After watching the first group present on Thursday, I can honestly say I am excited to see what the rest of the classes presentations are about. Although I felt uncomfortable in the beginning of the course, I am now becoming more confident in math than I have ever been. I can't believe it has taken 16 years of schooling before someone has opened my eyes to the processes behind math. My appreciation for math is definitely renewed.

Place Value

I thought the LPU for teaching place value was a fun and new way of learning place value. Though to be honest, I was very confused at what we were learning to teach our students in place value. I am confused on why we need to teach students the base 3 and base 5 values if we only really use base 10 to teach math problems. Maybe I am just confused on part of the lesson and don't remember being taught any of base 3 and base 5 in my elementary school days. However, I thought the using the manipulatives in the game was a fun way to understand addition and subtraction. It is a great visual and hands-on way to really show your students how to "steal" in subtraction and not "borrowing." I also think it is a better term to use "steal" instead of "borrow" so that students understand that the number column is not getting anything back. I also really liked getting to see using the unit blocks in one of the previous lessons for addition and subtraction. These are some learning manipulatives I would like to use in my future classroom to help explain math as it is very confusing for some students.

CGI LPU

I feel that presenting the LPU was a great learning experience. It is a great way to practice teaching new topics as well as to learn how to be a better teacher. I really liked engaging our "students" with including their names in our catchy poems. It was fun integrating language arts with the poems into our lesson. I believe this teaches students another fun way to play around with math problems. I wish we would have spent more time explaining the definitions of the different CGI problems to help everyone understand them better because I felt our lesson would be a better review lesson for CGI instead of the first time working with it. Also, this brings up the point that not everyone reads the homework readings to understand the just of the CGI lesson and as a teacher, you should be prepared for that.