During
this entire winter semester, I feel that I have a new found respect for
mathematics and the many ways that it can actually be taught to primary and
elementary students. Since our childhood years were many years ago, it was hard
for me to picture teaching math without it being intimidating with limited
techniques to do so. But I have gratefully learned throughout this course that
you can teach math in many different ways which includes lots of hands-on
learning. For me, this type of learning is meaningful for children because they
enjoy using blocks or buttons while doing math rather than writing out
multiplication facts and memorizing the hundreds chart. With this in mind, I
believe the greatest learning experience for me was when we participated in
both the math fair and peer teaching assignment. These two projects allowed us
to investigate math on our own and figure out what problems we felt comfortable
completing and which ones would work excellent for primary elementary students.
I thoroughly enjoyed finding, creating, playing, and presenting our math fair
problem “Wolf Nim” and it was nice to be able to partner up with members of my
class to play our game. I liked seeing everyone’s engagement and how the game
was designed around the bizarre word “nim”. Along with playing our own math
fair game, I really enjoyed going around the classroom analyzing everybody else’s
projects. Due to the short time frame we had, I never got to complete all the
games but the ones I did do I liked and thought they would all work excellent
in the classroom setting.
Like
the math fair, the peer teaching assignment was also another authentic learning
experience for me. Having the opportunity to see so many different ways to
teach mathematics and practice math skills was very beneficial. It gave each
one if us more insight into what kinds of problems we can create or find for
our future students that will keep them enjoy mathematics!
My
thoughts and way of thinking towards mathematics has done a complete one-eighty.
Before entering this course I truly believed that this subject was going to
very hard to teach to young children just because I was unaware of all the
different materials that are available to educators. Math always seemed dry and
boring to me, and I am very relieved that I can potentially change this outlook
on mathematics to a curriculum area with fun filled activities and problems!
