"Math Cats Math Chat" Financial Literacy Even young students can develop healthy habits of saving toward short-term and long-term goals, and intermediate students can learn to research and invest virtual money in the stock market.
Math Questions Worth Asking Let's look at the qualities of questions that call on higher order thinking skills and consider how we can infuse our math classes with questions and activities that target those skills. Spreadsheets: A Dynamic Path to Understanding Math A spreadsheet program might be one of the most underappreciated assets on nearly every computer. Winter Math. Whether charting cold weather or creating snowflakes, you'll find that math comes alive in wintry explorations.
There's something about snow that's irresistibly compelling to kids. Whether you live in an area that sees lots of snow or one that never feels a flake, you and your students can enjoy the fun and fascination of mathematical snowflake explorations. Capture Snowflakes It's great to have an educational justification for running outside when the flakes start falling!
Here are several ways to capture and preserve the details of real snowflakes for classroom study: Chill black construction paper, black or blue foam core, or black felt taped to cardboard by placing it in a freezer, and then take the sheets outside while snow is falling. Analyze Snowflakes The next best thing to being there -- or maybe even better -- is to plunge into the world of snowflake photographs. Halloween Math. Halloween is a time for math fun as students explore pumpkins, spiders, and webs.
And what do students do when they get home from trick-or-treating? Why, they sort and count their candy before eating it, of course! How many seeds? Cut open a pumpkin. Have each small group estimate how many seeds are in the pumpkin. Math Cats Math Chat: A Student-Led Math Family Fun Night. For more information and insights into planning for a student-led family math night, be sure to see Wendy Pettis article A Student-Led Math Family Fun Night: Learning from the Planning Process.
Does the prospect of coordinating a student-led math event seem daunting? As the coordinator of my school's first Math Family Fun Night, I wish I could tell you that everything went off without a hitch. Overall the evening was quite a success, but my students and I identified several improvements for future Math Nights. Here is our rough road map for future student-led Math Nights, along with the hope that these tips might prove useful as you begin to think about planning a student-led Math Family Fun Night at your school. Your focus will be on supporting your students as they plan and lead the event, but first you'll need to determine your primary goal, who will be invited, and where and when the event will be held.
Start small. Family Math Night. Math Cats Math Chat: A Math Toolbox in Every Home. As teachers, we know the value of hands-on exploration with math manipulatives in school.
We can extend the sense of discovery and empowerment into our students homes by helping them assemble math toolboxes to be enjoyed by the whole family. What math tools do you find most useful in the classroom? Those tools will be most useful at home, too. Rather than purchasing expensive sets of Base Ten blocks, Cuisenaire rods, pattern blocks, counters, number tiles, and more, students and their families can create their own simple handmade versions of the math tools you use in school.
Handmade math tools can be created from... Free Materials small or large boxes cardboard egg cartons styrofoam food trays plastic food containers magazine cutouts nature's manipulatives -- including twigs, leaves, nuts, berries and from... Inexpensive Materials. "Math Cats Math Chat" Math Problem Solving With Pictures. By Wendy Petti Picturing a problem often is the key to helping students understand the problem and identify a solution.
We teach students many problem-solving strategies, but probably the most powerful and flexible problem-solving strategy is, "Make a picture or diagram. " Picturing a problem often is the key to helping students understand the problem and identify a solution. Pictures or diagrams also can serve as prompts to help students keep track of what they need to find out in multi-step problems.
Many students try to picture a problem by drawing all the details of the problem. We can give students, instead, an approach using much simpler images for understanding the information in a problem. The use of bar models is one of the visualization strategies used in the highly effective Singapore Math program. Picturing Mental Math. By Wendy Petti Help students become more mathematically literate by giving them the tools for quick mental math.
When we use math in the "real world," we often need to come up with a quick number mentally in a few moments: How many more minutes until the end of class? How much will three tickets cost? Teaching Place Value With Arrow Cards. By Wendy Petti What are arrow cards and what do you do with them?
Most teachers are familiar with place value charts and base ten blocks for helping to build, reinforce, and extend place value concepts. Teachers in the United Kingdom also use arrow cards to support place value skills and concepts, and this useful tool is beginning to catch on in the United States as well. Let's take a look at how to make, use, and explore with arrow cards. Arrow cards are a set of place value cards with an "arrow" or point on the right side. When arrow cards are color-coded by place, they are easier to organize, and the color helps reinforce the concept of place.
"Math Cats Math Chat" Functions in the Real World. When we introduce students to functions, we typically bring the concept to life through the idea of function machines.
But functions will really begin to come to life as our students find uses for functions in the real world. Students easily grasp the idea of a function machine: an input goes in; something happens to it inside the machine; an output comes out. Another input goes in; another output comes out. What's going on inside the machine? If we know the machine's function rule (or rules) and the input, we can predict the output. Financial Literacy. By Wendy Petti At a time when many adults don't know how to plan wisely for the future, even our youngest citizens can start to develop "money smarts.
" The world still reels from the fallout of the economic tailspin precipitated by unfortunate, overly optimistic, or shortsighted institutional and individual financial choices. Now more than ever, we need to educate ourselves and help our students become financially literate -- be able to make sound decisions about managing personal finances and understand the fundamentals of our national and global economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has proposed a sequence of economic terms and concepts to be introduced in the elementary grades: Kindergarteners can learn the meaning of wants, needs, scarcity, choice, goods, and services through simple scenarios bringing those concepts to life. Happily, we can tap an abundance of financial literacy resources for each age group. Math in the News. By Wendy Petti Who needs word problems when the news is rich with real-life math problems?
Students find math more meaningful and relevant when they can use their math skills to better understand and analyze current events. Below are some practical suggestions for tapping into newspapers and online news sources as an integral part of your math program. It's easy to keep an eye on the latest news at CNN, Yahoo, or Google News. Science Daily reports cutting-edge news in the realms of math, science, and technology. Functions in the Real World. Connecting to Math in Real Life. By Wendy Petti. "Math Cats Math Chat" Math Magic. What Is Math? "Math Cats Math Chat" Math Questions Worth Asking. By Wendy Petti We all know the difference between closed and open questions: Closed questions typically involve recalling a fact or performing a skill; open questions stimulate deeper thought. In a typical math classroom, the majority of questions are closed.
Let's look at the qualities of questions that call on higher order thinking skills and consider how we can infuse our math classes with open questions and activities targeting higher order thinking skills. Good Questions Extend Learning Math questions worth asking are likely to have one or more of these qualities or intents: There might be more than one acceptable answer. Convince Me? Even Teachers Make Mistakes. We all make mistakes. Even teachers do. I've seen spelling mistakes on teacher-made bulletin boards, tests, and newsletters and usually I say nothing. I've watched a math teacher make a careless mistake during a mini-lesson, and no one said anything during the long minutes that the mistake remained on the chalkboard.
I've wondered, "Do the students not notice? Or do they think it's disrespectful to correct the teacher? " Until last year, I managed to get through many years of teaching without any student pointing out a mistake I had made in math or anything else. That all changed this year when the first student who caught me in a mistake asked in fun, "Do I get a prize for that? " I now throw myself open to your questions. Why would you want to encourage students to catch your mistakes? When a student catches the teacher in a mistake, it is a moment of friendly celebration for the whole class.