My work
For PSIII, I was placed in a Grade 4 classroom with an amazing mentor teacher who introduced me to the work of Jo Boaler, which is what inspired my project. I was able to take what I learned from Jo Boaler's work and apply it to the design of my lessons and teaching style and it entirely changed the way I thought about teaching mathematics. Below are galleries of images that I took during lessons that I developed while trying to incorporate mathematical mindset teachings. I have described the focus of each lesson and the activity that went along with it.
Pattern Stations
My first unit that I taught was the patterns unit. We learned about how to recognize and represent different patterns in different ways. One of the first activities I did with my students was patterns stations around the classroom. Each student had a booklet to guide the activities and different stations had different manipulatives to help students with the activities. For this lesson, I found it very interesting to see the difference in how my students learned being up and moving around the classroom versus sitting in their desks. This lesson was right at the beginning of my practicum and really changed the way I designed my math lessons because of how much more my students were able to learn by incorporating movement around the classroom.
Multiplication Inquiry
One of the most important things that I learned during this practicum was how to engage students in the learning before learning the material. How you ask questions at the beginning of a lesson can open the doors for inquiry and curiosity. I learned that having engaging activities that get students thinking can guide your instruction in many ways. I designed a lesson around this to practice developing engaging questions before introducing a new topic. In this case, we were about to start our multiplication unit and before doing a single multiplication question, I asked the students to think about why we use multiplication. Then, I introduced the activity. My students had to brainstorm as many things that naturally came in different groups of numbers. This was really interesting to use this activity at the start of the unit because I think it got my students thinking about multiplication with real world, tangible examples. It was easier to introduce new multiplication ideas after having them recognize the way multiplication occurs in their worlds without them knowing it.
Games- Battle of Arrays
One of my favourite ways to engage students in math is with games. It feels like a natural way to develop positive thinking towards math. I also think that gamification of mathematics can develop fluency and flexibility in numbers in a low-risk setting that can encourage students working together as well as learning through play. One of the games I played with my students was Battle of Arrays, which is a take on Battleships. Students had to create arrays using cards and dice. They were then supposed to write the multiplication sentence that the array represented. They would create an array with the dimensions and the person who could take up the most space on the board won. It was a fun way to practice multiplication while also giving students a creative avenue to represent their knowledge.
Division Introduction
When I introduced division to my class, I started with an activity using gummy bears. I wanted to show the connection between multiplication and division before we started learning strategies. I had the students split a page of paper into two sections and we started with multiplication. I asked them to show me on the page what 3 groups of 4 looked like. We determined that this was the way to represent 3x4=12. Then, I had them take 12 gummy bears and split them into 3 equal groups. Quite a few of them were able to recognize what was happening. I really liked this activity and how it incorporated visual and was low-floor and high-ceiling. It was engaging and fun to see the connections that students were able to make.
Games- Gimkit
One of our favourite games to play as a class are on Gimkit. We have played many different games and this one was one of the biggest hits with my class! We have used it for our patterns unit and multiplication and division.
Games- Multiplication and Division
Here is another example of different games that students were able to choose between to play to practice multiplication and related division facts.
Long Division Teams
I found that my students were struggling with the concept of long division and needed to find a task that would allow them to work with peers and could support all of the learners in my class. I recognized that my original lesson teaching them long division lacked the engagement and real-life meaningful connection that I needed to have them learn this new concept. What I did to help fix this was to put my students into groups and split up the different steps of long division into roles that each student was responsible for in solving the equation. The first student would do the first step of division, the second would multiply, the third would perform the subtraction and the fourth would bring down. It helped to chunk the task of a lengthy problem into more manageable steps and it also created room for peer-teaching and support. I found this activity very successful and engaging!