Eddie's Math Teaching Blog

Recently, my math class went to Peach Plains Elementary in Grand Haven to teach a lesson on measurement to a first and fourth grade class. We split up the class into groups of two and divide ourselves between the first and fourth grade classes. I was sent into the fourth grade class. The activity that we ran was measuring three items in the school building, which was a backup plan from the playground equipment we had planned to measure because of the rain. My partner and I had a group of four kids, three girls and a boy, and we were able to measure the three objects pretty easily. One girl was rather energetic, measuring the objects quickly enough to prompt us to tell her to measure the objects from another direction. At the end, we went back to the classroom to perform a bit of multiplication to determine how long the objects were in inches. This is where I had my moment. The one boy in my group was an energetic boy, seemingly a troublemaker, and he didn’t seem to enjoy the math he

Since I am interested in being a math teacher, I am taking a class that is dedicated to teaching aspects of math. While most of the students in the class do not have a math education major, math is the primary focus of the class. One idea in the class was to break down larger math concepts into little pieces so that big picture ideas are easier to learn. One activity that made this lesson easier to understand was finding the are of irregular shapes on a grid sheet of paper. We had to find the area of the shape without using common formulas for triangles or using other complex issues. As a result, we made observations that lead to us getting the area correct. I believe that using this method in classroom would really benefit the kids, as they would begin to make connections understanding the area of triangles without ever learning the A= 1/2bh formula. In the lesson, just like in class, we would encourage our students to design their own shape on the grid and get the creators of the s