Brock Math Blog

The past two sessions have been on topics that I have always struggled with in math; ratios/proportions and algebra. Although these topic areas frighten me, after our two classes, they seem way more exciting. Last week we had an activity that I really enjoyed involving ratios and proportions. It provided a good real-life example and allowed us to work in partners which made me feel more confident in completing the activity. This activity made good use of manipulatives, making predictions, and understanding how ratios work. We also completed an activity in class that encouraged us to use snap cubes to solve a real-life ratio word problem. I appreciated using the manipulatives for this because I had a visual, hands-on component to help me understand and complete the question. After my group figured it out, we decided to make a turkey--how creative and fun! After both the learning activity and the group work in class, I felt so much more confident about teaching ratios and proportio...

Well, another couple weeks into 8P29 and more math information has been flowing. The last couple of sections focused on fractions, decimals, and integers—more number sense and numeration. I was interested in the different tools and manipulatives we can use to teach and represent fractions. Candy and chocolate is a good tool but can be messy for younger grades so it would definitely need to be considered carefully and thoroughly. I also ran my learning activity during one of the sessions. Completing this task was fun but a bit challenging. I wanted to create an activity that was engaging and fun but also very connected to the curriculum. It was very helpful using our textbook—Making Math Meaningful—to help spark ideas for an actual activity. There were so many sample activities discussed throughout the chapter for fractions and decimals, and even ones that you could implement both concepts into one activity. This I thought was very important because in math a lot of concepts are interco...