My Least Favourite: Ratios and Algebra

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 proportions. This week we had a class introducing patterning and algebra. I was definitely not excited about this and very nervous to participate. We had another great learning activity to introduce this topic area which provided us with the opportunity to work independently, and use graphs (which was an excellent visual representation) to begin to work through and understand how patterns can be made into algebraic expressions. This activity was also based on a real-life scenario which as a student I really appreciate because it shows me how this concept in math is directly related to things we encounter day to day. I think I would have appreciated a bit more of a lesson or focus on the algebraic part of math because that's a struggle for me and being in Junior/Intermediate I will be teaching this concept to students. After reviewing our textbook further though and resources such as Khan Academy, I feel more confident about reviewing these concepts with my students as well as teaching them.

Looking through our Making Math Meaningful textbook a lot of the information and activities gave me a sense of comfort. This textbook has provided me with another resource to understand the material and pull fun activities to implement in my own classroom. I like that the textbook provides a lot of examples of how to use manipulatives such as to represent patterns. An activity I really like for algebra is on page 372, activity 16.8 which asks students to create a real-life example of where you may use or find the expression 5n. In order to keep students engaged and attentive in the material, it is important to relate it to things they may come across in their own life. Especially for math, students think a lot of the concepts aren't useful, but if you can relate it to real-life situations they find real value in what they are learning. Feel free to browse this article for other examples of where we use math concepts in our everyday life. Thinking about how intimidated I was by these two concepts, I hope to foster a comfortable environment for my students to be able to come to me when they are having trouble with anything but also when they are feeling defeated by math.

This week for the game forum I am the resource manager and I chose a game directly relating to algebra. I browsed for a little while because algebra isn't one of my top favourite math concepts I wanted to see if I could find engaging, fun ways to learn more about it. I found a game (linked previously) I really enjoyed which I did decide to use for the forum. This game provides a fun problem-solving element in addition to understanding patterns. It's also very visually appealing and easy to understand. If I had the opportunity to play games such as this one when learning new math concepts, I feel like I would have been way more engaged and confident that I could master the material. Relating algebra to using manipulatives seemed like a difficult thing to do at first. After quite a few of our classes that even when we don't mean to use algebra it can actually be a tool used to solve a problem along with using manipulatives to represent solutions. I have embedded a video below showing another example of how we can use tiles to explain and represent algebra. Through all of our activities, group work, textbook, and lessons, I am feeling more confident going into my placement and teaching these concepts to my students!