Week 7-IBL

Whew! I'm glad this week is done! I had to present tonight and it's SO much easier getting up in front of 4th and 5th graders than it is people my own age. I had everything planned out and when I got up there, I froze. The first thing we did in class was play a football game that dealt with positive and negative integers. Our team lost...by a lot, but it's okay, because it was still a fun game :) We did an activity with the red and black tiles, and I understood some of it, but not all of it. The adding and dividing I got, but the subtraction and multiplication of negative numbers, I understood a little less. Then we talked about how to add and subtract fractions, which I never understood, but now I do. I thought our second Gateway exam was this week, but it's not, which was a nice surprise! :)

Week 6

This week, we learned about finding the greatest common factor, least common multiple, and prime factorization. I remember this stuff from middle school and I remember hating it, but I think teaching it will be a lot easier. The factor trees that we did were always the easiest way for me to find out what the prime factorization is, but I learned tonight that you can do more things with it. I looked on youtube for videos of finding the gcf and lcm, and I found a couple of really cool videos that I think would be useful for elementary students. One of them is using a Venn Diagram to find gcf and lcm, and the other one is called "prime birthday cake factorization," which I think kids would like (who doesn't like cake :D )

Birthday Cake

GCF, LCM Venn Diagram

Week 5, Base 5

Who knew there were different bases in math? I certainly didn't! I had no idea that we counted and did math in base 10. In yesterday's class, we learned how to add and subtract in base 5. It was so confusing! The ONLY way that I could figure it out was with the kit. I thought it was really interesting to kind of be in our student's shoes and how frustrated they would be in base ten. Mrs. Cotton said that we could teach base 5 to our students if we wanted to, but I think base 10 will be enough for them. We also learned multiplication and Mandi taught us using the grouping and dots. I found a youtube video that showed numbers using dots and it reminded me of it. They gave different things to help, too, like using Dominoes or Legos.


Teaching Kindergarten Math : How to Teach Kids Numbers

Week 4-Power Outage!

I got a text message at around 3:30 saying there was a power outage and all classes for the evening were cancelled! I was a little nervous because I took the Unit 1 test this morning. I thought it was easy, and a lot of them were common sense questions (I found out I was wrong =/) Since I wasn't at class last week either, I hope I don't get too far behind ):