Today in class we were introduced to the novel the number devil. I think that this novel would be a great resource to use within any primary/elementary school classroom to aid with the understanding of mathematics. After Mary read us just a small portion to give us just a little glimpse of what this novel was about I became mesmerized. This is definitely a book that I would use within my classroom; also the fact that it is so versatile and you can use it in both primary/elementary increased my fascination to this novel. It also covers basic concepts, infinite numbers, prime numbers, numbers that expand and the challenges surrounding calculators just to name a few.
Today in class we also got to get hands on and had to put our thinking caps on which I found to be very exciting. We got into groups and each group was given an amount of sand, we were then expected to find out how many grains of sand were there. Me and Veronique who was my partner thought about a number of approaches before we actually started, we finally ended up by filling up 1 cm cubes we ended up with 14 cubes being filled then we emptied one of the cubes out and further broke down the amount into half’s until we were only dealing with a tiny amount of sand that we were able to count the grains. When we were given the chance to walk around and see the other approaches that some of the other groups used I was amazed to find that there were so many different attempts that had not even crossed my mind. I quickly realized that children need to be exposed to this type of activity to understand that there is not always one right answer or one way to reach a specific answer.
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