Thursday, March 26, 2009

And The Teaching Episodes Begin !


Today our math class like many to follow was based on our teaching episode presentations. There were three groups that gave their presentations today. My partner and I were one of these three groups but I will talk about that in my next blog.

I consider the opportunity to participate as a student in these presentations as very insightful and much like the last few classes to be very hands on. This experience greatly enhanced my interest in teaching in a more problem solving way and it expanded my understanding of how beneficial creating problem solving activities like the ones that were demonstrated can be so useful and helpful within a classroom setting. The opportunity to be placed in the position that children will be in and to see things from a different perspective can change ones outlook in amazing ways due to the fact that you are experiencing and getting an idea of what makes this method so successful.

The variety of games/ activities presented were very creative and really got me thinking about how easy it is to create and incorporate this type of teaching in the classroom and how it can be used in every area of math. It is also evident of the cross-curricular links that just seem to pop up everywhere and how you can take areas of other subjects into math or bring math into those different areas. For example the presentation dealing with tallying and graphing by using the different seasons you can easily take that idea and incorporate it to build on a science unit that relates to the different seasons.

Also I found that when you use a more exploring and self-discovery method of teaching that it instantly becomes of more interest for the students. When I was in primary and elementary school math was always considered to be the boring subject or the one that was focused completely on desk work but I can see this way of teaching as changing that negative attitude towards math and compelling children to want to participate and even get excited about doing math problems. The more meaning that can be placed on math and reasoning of how we use it so much will greater peoples understanding of why its so important to use this method of math in classrooms.

I really enjoyed all the presentations and am excited to see the ones that are to come. I find them to be inspiring and can easily see me using ones much like them when I have my very own classroom.

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