This week’s blog will be slightly
different as I was only present for half of last night’s class. Instead I will discuss the topics that we
talked about for the first hour of class and one of the presentations that I
did get the opportunity to sit in on.
We
started the class off by talking about spiraling. Spiraling is a method of teaching the
curriculum that focuses on learning concepts over time and not in specific
periods of time. What I mean by that is
instead of teaching the mathematics curriculum one section or unit at a time,
you almost teach all units at once. As
explained by Amy Lin (2017), you first start by teaching a little bit of
everything – but only the basics. After going
through every section of the curriculum, you complete a ‘cycle.’ You then repeat the process, going over more
difficult concepts as the cycles get smaller and more focused. I think this is a really cool way to teach
mathematics! When it comes to exam time,
students are always forgetting what they learned in unit one. By using spiraling, it eliminates this
problem as students are consistently using what they’ve learned in every unit
throughout the duration of the semester.
As well it creates a connection between different types of math. By teaching this way, students are able to
learn about not only these links between topics, but between mathematics and
the real world. As a very new teacher,
this method is very intimidating to me.
I love the idea of it, and all of the benefits from its use makes me
want to try it, however, I haven’t become comfortable with the entire curriculum
yet. I feel as though before I would
even attempt spiraling in my own classroom, I would first need to teach the
semester a couple of times in order to be comfortable enough with the
curriculum to explore different methods of teaching. This is definitely something that I’m going
to remember in the future and I hope to give it a try one day!
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| Retrieved from: http://imageenvision.com/450/42328-clip-art-graphic-of-a-spiraling-hurricane-by-maria-bell.jpg |
I
was also fortunate enough to see one presentation. Last night’s presentations were at the grade
ten level, so this lesson covered factoring trinomial quadratic equations. When I learnt factoring in high school, we
were to taught to find two numbers that multiplied to c and added to b in the
equation y=ax^2+bx+c. However, this
presenter taught us how to do this factoring with algebra tiles – a method I’ve
never seen before! I thought it was such
a cool tool to use, and it would have been so useful to me as a student when I
was first learning how to factor. To use
algebra tiles to factor, you simply arrange all of the tiles that correspond to
each expression in the equation to make a rectangle. For example, if you had x^2+5x+6, you would
have one large square for x^2, 5 rectangles for 5x, and 6 small squares. When you arrange these tiles into a rectangle,
the sides that don’t contain the x^2 tile will make up your factored equation
(see diagram below). For this example,
the answer would be (x+2) (x+3). I can’t
reiterate enough how cool I think this is.
I will definitely take this with me and use it for my future students –
if not for individual student use, at least to help demonstrate the concept
with a visual.
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| Retrieved from: https://image.slidesharecdn.com/algebra-tiles-pp-version-2-1204911748337908-3/95/algebra-tiles-pp-version-2-52-728.jpg?cb=1204882949 |
Overall, I really enjoyed the topics
this week! I can definitely see myself
using these ideas in the future!
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