8P29 Week 6 Post

This was the week I did my learning activity assignment, which consists of a 10-minute presentation where you lead your peers through an activity you could do with students and the different strategies for solving the problem. It went surprisingly better than I thought it would; I had had nightmares about it the night before, and usually presentations don’t faze me. This week’s theme was on proportional reasoning and includes questions on ratio, rate, and percent. Proportional reasoning can be a trick thing to teach students because it relies on students being able to change the way they think from multiplicative to additive thinking, and also relies on a firm understanding and snap knowledge of multiplication, division, and factors. Considering how many students (and adults!) rely on calculators to do even basic math, this can be a bit of a challenge. But with the proper practise and scaffolding through the use of charts, manipulatives and hundreds grids anything is possible.

Pythagoras and the Ratios book cover. Retrieved from
http://www.amazon.com/Pythagoras-Ratios-A-Math-Adventure/dp/1570917760

I liked exploring the different children’s books recommended at the end of the proportional thinking chapter of Small’s Making Math Meaningful. Pythagoras and the Ratios by Julie Ellis is a fun way to introduce children to mathematical history and the idea of ratios. The book deals more with ratios in musical chords than it does with other types of ratios, but I think that’s still acceptable because it can show the student that math doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but actually shows up in all parts of their life. Something I’m learning through my placement is that it’s often hard for teachers to fit everything they want to teach into a day, because activities inevitably almost always take longer than estimated. That is why it’s a good idea to integrate subjects as much as possible. Have students read about book about science or math, that way you kill two birds with one stone.

The activity I used in my ratio presentation had to do with adjusting recipes based on serving size, but I brainstormed a couple other ideas I think students might find fun. Having seen the movie Antman a few months ago, it got me thinking about how an ant’s relative strength is much much higher compared to its mass than a human’s strength is. It might be fun to learn about different animals and ratios by finding other animals and insects with “superpowers” like the ants and figuring out how that strength scales if that animal was the size of a human. I haven’t fleshed out this idea though, so it may be too complicated to put into practice in a classroom, we’ll see.  This year is going to be full of trial and error, but I don’t mind. No one ever learned anything doing the same thing every day.