Made for Math Monday 7-16-12

I've recently connected with several math teachers on Twitter. The last three weeks they have been creating projects to use in their classrooms. One item I want to "try" to incorporate more into my classroom this year is a math journal. One idea I like is pinned on my Pinterest board

Home Depot is A Teacher's Friend

If I can get enough of these I will have my students use them. Otherwise we will use spiral notebooks.

Over the past couple of school years I've become more ware of the use of foldables in the classroom. Our resource staff at my elementary has purchased several of Dinah Zike's foldable books for both math and language arts. Here is the link to the K-6 book.

My project for this week focuses on "Keys to Math Signs". I was fortunate to be invited to serve on our state math standards review team a few years ago. One thing I noticed as our teams were reviewing the standards we had as a state for PreK-12 was that there was no consistency in the vocabulary/terminology of basic math terms. For example; often lower grade teachers would refer to the denominator as the bottom number, which in of itself wasn't a bad thing, but made secondary teachers work that much harder reteaching concepts they shouldn't have had to spend time with had the proper terms been introduced in the students primary years. I have particularly found it confusing for students by 5th grade when they have different ideas of what they believe the basic four algorithm signs represent. I found this page on another person's Pinterest - Keys to Math signs board and decided to make it into a foldable that will be placed into my students composition spirals.

I took a standard sheet of construction paper and folded it in half. I then glued the above sheet inside after folding it on the solid line between the two columns.

I then created my own sheet for the example for the front cover using pictures to represent the title words:

You may have noticed there was extra space on either side where I will have the students write notes to help them relate what each of the four basic math symbols are:























I know for most of my fellow math  bloggers this is very simple. However, it is my hope that by teaching the proper terms their last year of elementary students will feel more prepared for the upper levels of math.

This summer I decided to take as many classes as I could to learn alternate ways to teach utilizing technology. Many of the school districts in my area are part of an excellent consortium called The Eighth Floor. http://eighthfloor.org/ I have taken courses on how to use mobile devices, grant writing, Google  Docs and Differentiated Instruction so far. I have additional grant writing , smart board  and common core classes yet to take.

It's difficult for most educators from my era to grasp and effectively use technology. Here is a blog I read that truly hits the nail on the head about technology in education called "The Seven Golden Rules of Using Technology in Schools"

This is my first blog, so I'm deciding on how I want to utilize this, specifically how often to post.

Happy Reading!
Ed