Blog Post 4: EDBE 8P29 (October 7th, 2016)

Good Day Bloggers!

Objective: 

For this week, it is my objective for this blog post to present my responses to questions, ideas and information presented this week in the course EDBE 8P29 at Brock University!

Class Activities (Teachers in Training): 

This week in class, we began with an online dice game, used as a method for young students to learn about place value. The general gist of this game were to draw four boxes on a piece of paper, with the digits aiming to as close to ONE as possible. For example: 0.4567 or 0.5476 (which number is close to one?) We were taught that this game could be very motivating and encouraging for students, as it was fun four our class. I found this to be a great introduction to the class, as it got the class attentive and eager to learn about how to teach the order of decimals. Next, we learned about understanding about the function of the denominator. We used images like pizza and cake slices, and we were taught that we could use blocks in order to teach fractions.

                                                         Manipulatives For Place Value




After this, we began with the three presentations of the week.

Following this, reviewed number sense and numeration. We reviewed the grade 4 and 5 standards as an example: in grade four, students are expected to count forwards and backwards by (0.1 and fractional amounts up to 1/10) and in grade five (1/100). We next discussed a grade six lesson. Following this, and to conclude the class, we were engaging ourselves in a Tarsia puzzle, which I personally had a great time doing because it was challenging. It was a great way to practice mental math with fractions, as the purpose of this game for students is to challenge their fraction sense at a fast pace.

Reflection: 

I thoroughly enjoyed this lesson, as it challenged us as teacher candidates and the lessons we learned about how to teach students. I could definitely see myself in the future using the Dice and Tarsia games in my own classroom should I have the opportunity to teach elementary level mathematics.