How to Find the Treasure

             I’ve thought about what kind of homework I had as a kid that I enjoyed the most. A lot of it was simply projects that I could do at home with my family. When I was learning to read, I first had to learn my letters. One of the most entertaining homework assignments that I can remember simply involved a newspaper and pen. My teacher had me choose one article in a newspaper and circle all the a’s I could find. In my childish eyes, it was a lot like Where’s Waldo, and trust me, I loved those books!

So why don’t we have those for math lessons? They actually do exist! They are known as scavenger hunts though. Teachers basically make them up with any lesson they are doing at the moment. They can have the kids find whole numbers, fractions, and repeating decimals. It’s also a good way to tie math into any lesson having to do with years and important events. Here is what these scavengers may look like:

Math Scavenger Hunt #1   See if you can find each of these in the newspaper.  Write what you found and the page on which you found it.   A fraction that is more than one-fifth (1/5) Page____ A money amount less than $1 Page____  A date other than today’s Page____ A five-digit number Page____ A decimal that is not an amount of money  Page____ A store giving a discount of 20 percent or more Page____ An ad larger than half of the newspaper page Page____  A temperature higher than 40 degrees Page____ A stock that has gained more than one point Page____

                 Obviously the scavenger hunts would be different depending on what grade you teach. Third graders aren’t going to understand what a stock is. Hopefully the parents would be more than willing to help their children with their homework if they were to need it, but sadly not all children have that luxury. I know for myself personally, I feel proud when my sister feels comfortable coming to me for help with her homework. I can only hope that parents feel the same way and help them the same that I help my sister.

                Doing math this way allows students to connect math to an actual real life thing. Reading a newspaper they can understand people doing, it’s not as foreign to them as learning a new math concept. So if you pair the two together, learning a new concept may become less stressful. It may even seem normal then because it’s something you do in everyday life and don’t even realize it! Children need something concrete to build their math skills on. Something as simple as finding numbers in a newspaper or even magazine! May just do that! It’s like finding a hidden treasure. Exciting and fun for most children. I remember my mom sitting down next to me and my sister, all of us taking turns in circling the letters. I’d always find them, but I loved to share the joy in circling the letters up until the very end.  

Pins for pinterest

https://www.pinterest.com/

    Believe it or not, math lesson ideas are starting to sink into our social networking! Pinterest is a website where you have different boards. For example, you can have your wedding day, your future house, hair styles, nail designs,...etc. On the website, you are now beginning to see more educational boards where teachers or moms are putting up their creative ideas on how to get their children to do math. These ideas can be shared easily with a click of a button, literally!  It's neat to see the different ideas and pictures to go  along with them.
    One of the pins (what you call all the ideas and pictures under a single board) I enjoyed the most was the nerf gun math. The parents, or children, write whole digit numbers from 0-9 on plastic cups. The children then shoot cups until they all fall down. They need to write down the number on the cups that they shot, and then add them up. Let's face it, a nerf gun shootout will get anyone's attention!  Even my own because its fun and interactive!
      Another pin that I found rather unique had to deal with shape recognition. One parent thought it would be a great idea to turn snack time for the child into learning time for the brain as well. The adult took snacks and cut them into different shapes. Then on the plate it was served on, drew the same shapes. Next, they mixed the fruit up so the child could then match the food to the shape if they wished too. It gave them something to do while they were eating that kept their brain involved while at the same time probably taught them to not talk with their mouth open or full!
     There are also pins that you would never think of as actually being math skills.  For example, connecting the dots to reveal a picture.  Without even noticing, this is helping kids to count. Also, the greater than and less than signs being monsters. Who hasn't heard that one?! The monster always wants to eat the bigger number right?! It's a simple trick to get kids to remember which was to turn the sign. The open end always points towards the bigger number. My personal favorite though, was the 100th day of school project. On the 100th day of school each of my classmates, including myself, would have to choose a tiny object that they loved and count out 100 of them to put in a jar to bring to school. We then had show and tell with our jars and said why we loved the objects we had chosen. This is yet another, great idea to get kids to count to larger numbers!
    The thing I found most unique about these ideas however were that most of the ideas came from parents. These ideas most likely aren't classic ones that are taught to "teachers in training" as a way to involve their class. It was love and care for their own children that helped parents create interactive learning in everyday moments. Parents are teachers, except everday, every moment, they have a class watching their every move.
     So enjoy your social networking! You never know what math you'll find out there without even realizing it. At the top is a link to pinterest so  that you can find some ideas for some math exercises!  Enjoy!

Modern Museum Math

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/arts/design/hands-on-math-lessons-no-homework-required.html

            

            Let’s take a trip to Manhattan to go to a math museum! When you first open the doors, you see tons of children riding bikes and playing with magnets. What they don’t realize is that all the exhibits are teaching you different math concepts. I feel that if we turned classroom lessons more into these exhibits that children would have more fun in the classroom and feel less stress everyday learning math. They don’t see it as a boring lesson anymore, but rather a fun game that everyone can play.

 

                One of the exhibits actually has riding a bike as an activity. These bikes are specifically made to ride on the surface of this circular path. The wheels on the bike are square shaped. Then the path itself was wavy and wrapped around a single point to be forced into a circle. When the children would ride the bikes, the points of the square fit perfectly into the grooves of the waves so that the bike could move forward. However, if the children moved the bigger bikes more toward the center of the circle, they wouldn’t be able to move. This happened because the closer to the center, the closer together the waves become. That way, the bigger square wheels will go over more than one wave at a time and not fit. In its own way, the track is teaching the children shape recognition without them even realizing it!

                Then there is the Human Tree exhibit which teaches kids multiplying and dividing. The children step in front of a screen and their image shows up on it. Then when they put up their arms, their arms turn into their body. So now there are three of them on the screen. This goes on and on until there isn’t enough space on the screen to fit any more. With a cute idea they place flowers on some of the “branches” to make the image seem more like an actual tree. With this specific exhibit the creators are trying to represent multiplication and division. Let’s say you started out with an image of yourself and your two arms just became replications of your body. So we wanted to find the multiple of two and three. So you would start with your main body and draw two bodies off of that. So that gives you the multiple of three that you are working with. Then you have to make sure that each body has two bodies that represent where the arms would go, then you stop adding on to it. Once you finished putting together the drawing on the screen, you just add up how many bodies you have. You should get six, and you can do this for multiple other problems as well.

                The museum doesn’t have set exhibits though. There are traveling shows that are encased in the math museum itself as well. A funny face exhibit is one of these traveling show’s exhibits. You sit in front of a camera that photographs your face. Next the photo is stretched or scrunched to give off the image of a “fun-house mirror”.  There is actually and exact formula using and X and Y coordinates that changes the pixels of the original photo to create this new image.

                This museum uses coordinates, sines, cosines, vectors, hypotenuses, shape recognition, as well as some physics attributes to help teach children in a fun and unique way math skills that are needed in practically every school. It’s definitely worth taking a look at the link at the top and possibly planning a trip to!

 

 

Khan can help!

http://www.khanacademy.org/

         The link above is a wonderful website that my best friend showed me. He has a teacher that isn't great at explaining the math lesson. This website has math lessons from 3rd grade math in the U.S. to calculus. Not only do they have practice problems, but they have videos actually teach you how to do the problems before you even attempt them. They take you through step by step on how to produce the solution. 
           For example, with the lesson on learning multiplication, they have 12 balls in groups. In the video they then go through and explain how you can have 2 groups of 6, 4 groups of 3, 3 groups of 4,...etc. They highlight these groups so that the child can actually see the different groups you can make. It creates a visual way to learn this concept of multiplication. Which is great for students who learn visually like myself!
            The video itself goes slowly and you have that nice ability to rewind the video and see it again and again if you didn't understand the first time. Then when you are practicing, if you need a hint, you are allowed 3. If you get 5 questions in a row correct, you get to move up a level. I can understand how this can be both rewarding and frustrating for a child. They could be working really hard and just not getting the problem. In which case they may not ever get those 5 in a row! However, it may also push them to try harder and do better and improve.
         This visual gives children an easier way to look at math. It reminds me of when we cut the whole into pieces during our percent chapter. In the videos they actually write on the screen to show what they are describing. They also encourage you to pause the video and try the problem on your own. I wish they left more time for you to pause the video before he went on to explain how to do the problem once again.
          I feel as though technology has a lot of negative aspects in today's society. However, I feel like technology in this case could help students to stay caught up in class. I know that if I miss a single day in class its easy for me to fall behind in the lesson. So if I could find out the topic we were learning about, I could find the lesson plans on khan and at least know how to attempt the homework. It can also help students that need help outside of the classroom. Khan can act like a free tutor. As long as the family has internet,  khan will always be there to help you. I only wish that I had known of this website earlier!
            It also has other subjects such as: humanities, economics and finance, and physics. There are group chats where you can talk to people and get support. It also shows you how to do computer programing so you can create your own website that helps others like khan does. There are so many sources that could help you on this website that it would be crazy not to take advantage of them all! Have fun learning!

Common core curse out

I honestly don't understand how all this common core material is going to help students. Especially for students that aren't great at handling school stress to start with. My sister is 9 and is coming home and asking me for help with her math homework. Other kids aren't so lucky to have an older sibling that can sit down and explain this material to them. I babysit kids that have been held inside from recess due to receiving bad grades on their math homework because they haven't even learned the material yet. How are children suppose to perform well on these tests when they are just stressing over them? Plus studying for these tests is now isolating them from their classmates by not being able to participate in recess or playing with the kids in the neighborhood after school.

Thanks to this, mathophobia is probably going to become an even bigger problem as well. Since children are learning more advanced math at a younger age, guess what they are probably going to be able to use! You probably guessed right!! A calculator! Now these children will most likely become little monkeys that push what buttons we tell them too without actually understanding why. Math will just become a process for the next generation, not so much an explanation as to why a theory is proven true.

On top of that, how do we really study for math? Well, the old way used to be to just practice PrAcTiCe PRACTICE! However, with the new common core, reading skills is a major part if the testing as well. So now we need to review with the children how to read the question as well as how to answer it. That also takes away from the time we have to teach the actual math and the concept as to why and how the math works.

I've watched kids have terrible emotions that I don't remeber having as a kid because of all the new math tests. Frustration, anger, guilt, and low self-esteem. These are emotions that children shouldn't experience along with math. It's going to add to this idea of math as being an "evil" subject.

So how is this common core actually helping the students? In my eyes, it just seems to be a way to make the U.S. look smarter and therefore inferior to other countries. However,  how is that truly going to benefit this country if its not in the best interest for the students, and only the students. I think it would be more beneficial to slow things down and to not cram everything that I've learned the past three years in math into a 1st graders brain in one class. It's just too much too fast for them to handle.

Sadly, the only thing these kids are going to learn from the common core is how to funcion a graphing calculator 10 years too early. Oh, just kidding, they are also going to understand what being stressed out feels like well before their middle school years. Today I look back and wish I could be a kid again. None of these children are going to have a childhood they'll want to look back on.

Mathophobia

             This new splurge in our society on technology has added to our mathophobia problem. How many times have you seen a teenager whip out a cell phone to calculate how much of a tip to leave? Or even a simple math problem because they are just too "tired" to do it in their head? Thanks to the handy dandy contraptions we call calculators, mathophobia has become a greater issue after the elementary education levels. In high school teenagers are taught how to do basically everything on their calculator. Take it away from them and they have that oh so famous deer in headlights look about them. Naturally the first instinct for them is to go blank, and therefore begin to score worse on tests. Walking into the next test is going to completely psych them out to perform at a lower level than they are capable of yet again.
             Can you imagine how much better test scores would be if students practiced mathematics without a calculator throughout all of their higher education? We, as students, would be forced to exercise our brains everyday. In the long run, it would provide us with better health as we grow older. Yes, it would take longer for us on a test if we were to write out everything we are doing step by step. It would also lead to a more challenging class for all the students. These classes would also show us that we are capable to do more than what we expect of ourselves. We would most likely become more independent since we won't be depending on a calculator to just chug out the correct answer for us to repeat to our teachers. It would make teenagers and young adults be not afraid to do simple mathematics without a calculator and it would raise their confidence in themselves.
               Lucky enough for me I've never had mathophobia. Yes, doing computations without using the calculator is more difficult for me. At the same time, I'm not great with technology at all! So those graphing calculators that are required for high school, or my high school at least, I didn't like them at all. However, I do have slight test anxiety and that makes any test taking extremely difficult for me to overcome. Many people don't understand the difficulties of having test anxiety because it's just another test to them. However, people who have it tend to understand the long hours of studying that come with it. In a way, mathophobia isn't that different than test anxiety.
              It may take more studying and more conferences with your teachers, but their is hope of overcoming both these psychological disadvantages during tests. All you have to do is find a way that works for you. It may be starting from the end of the test and working your way forward(that's how I usually do it), or maybe having a lucky pen/pencil. You have to find what relaxes you and go for extra help. Trust in your teachers enough to tell them you need help with overcoming your mathophobia. Friends are always there to help you as well. In the end, we can all do well. It just matters how hard your willing to try to go far in life.