Posted in math, portfolio on Apr 2nd, 2008 5 Comments »
In my classroom, we are currently studying money. This is very difficult! There is also a huge amount of variation between the children. Some (who have a fairly developed conception of our number system, are very capable of counting money, and are even to the point of making change! Others are [...]
Posted in classroom community, ideas, lesson plan, math, portfolio, theory on Mar 18th, 2008 1 Comment »
Van de Walle’s chapter on Problem Solving has been incredibly helpful in planning for my own teaching. He carefully deconstructs the methods used by effective teachers to and scaffolds beginning teachers well as they begin experimenting with lesson plans. Though the focus of the book is math, these methods could easily and effectively be applied [...]
Posted in classroom management, lesson plan, math, portfolio on Feb 14th, 2008 3 Comments »
Being that I work in a first-grade classroom, I am very interested in learning about the way that children understand place value and base ten. I am planning on interviewing three students who represent the various stages of conceptual mathematical understanding. Student 1 is a young girl who is sweet, eager, and hard [...]
Posted in math, portfolio on Feb 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
When I learned about the base ten system in my math classes here, I was completely amazed. It had never occurred to me just how arbitrary a numerical symbol could be. For the first time, I realized that math was about relationships and “negative space,” so to speak. Most people think of math as [...]
