Week 7 Reflection

Week 7 Blog

Hello! Welcome back to my week 7 blog post. Something that I have never shared before is how I never trusted math teachers who use graph paper. I always felt like they were plotting something.

           I had to present my learning activity last week in Chapter 14: Rate, Ratios, and Proportions. That is when I realized how important proportions were in our daily lives. While planning my learning activity I also realized how challenging it is to teach topics to someone when that topic has almost been second nature to you. I have used rates, ratios, and proportions all of my life and forget how I even learned them in the first place. Starting at point zero and working my way up to how I use ratios in my daily life now is something I really needed to reflect on before I started to teach my activity. I decided to use real-life examples to put it more in perspective of how often we use the three concepts daily. I always felt that I processed information better when something that I was learning was connected to the real world. The examples which I provided were gas price examples $1.10/litre, people with blue eyes vs brown eyes, and distance on a map vs real life. I chose a lesson specifically about mapping because it had a cross-curricular connection between math and geography. The activity also provided a real-life example of proportions and how scales on maps are used regularly to calculate real-life distance.

           I find it really useful to have my classmates present learning activities because so far all of them have been super informative and cater to different learning styles. It is nice to observe and learn from different teaching styles as well. I make mental notes about aspects of the presentations I liked and disliked to improve my presenting skills. I am not the most confident during presentations but definitely want to improve and the learning activity presentations are allowing me to do so.   

          

          When I was looking up overall and specific expectations for my learning activity, I also noticed that the activity fell under many grades for overall and specific expectations. In grade 8 specific expectations it states, “identify and describe real-life situations involving two quantities that are directly proportional” (pg. 112) and the specific expectations for grade 7 was “demonstrate an understanding of rate as a comparison, or ratio, of two measurements with different units”(pg. 100). While being the same activity, there were different expectations from different grades. 

     

            I definitely also have a greater understanding of teaching math with manipulatives. Using manipulatives will help students link ideas and incorporate their knowledge to achieve a profound understanding of mathematical concepts. I cannot wait to incorporate manipulatives in my math lesson plans. With that being said, this ends my reflection for this week, talk to you all soon. 

Resouces:

Ontario Ministry of Education (2005). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8 Mathematics (revised). Retrieved from: http://www.edugains.ca or http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/ elementary/math18curr.pdfSmall, M. (2016) Making Math Meaningful to Canadian Students, K-8. Nelson (3^rd Edition)