Fun in math...

I love the three periods I spend in 7th grade math.  The teacher uses math talk and her own personality to build a safe, friendly classroom community.  In some periods this is harder than others, but even in the most rambunctious class, there is still community in her classroom.   

Some examples of the way she makes the classroom fun and warm - these won't sound as joyful in writing as they are in person, but they truly convey a happiness to be there:

She has the kids answer her phone when it rings during class with: "Mrs. Doe's classroom.  Student speaking.  We love math!"

Good answers get a "Kiss your brain!" which she models by kissing her hand and tapping her head.

She wears a special math lab coat on test days, which has a variety of math equations written on it with permanent marker.  She wears it to bring in the good math karma.

When students don't have a pencil, they get to borrow one from her if they leave a shoe on deposit (so far the kids all treat this as silly). 

She stamps homework and worksheets with a custom rubber stamp which says "Mrs. Doe approves!"

Math foldables...

In my 7th grade math class, I've watched this week as the class has worked on little foldables of math rules to paste into their math notebooks.  The school had a funky schedule with 1/2 the classes meeting every other day because of conferences, so I had time to go home and think about the foldables before the other 1/2 of the classes did them the next day.  The exercise of making the foldables is just cutting and pasting and coloring. There was no discussion of the rules in the math book during this class session, though there was on the days before and after, and I didn't see the value of the foldables.

But then I went home and read some math teacher blogs about the foldables.  The teachers love them!  Here's a link to one teacher's math blog with foldables. I still didn't understand why though.  What math learning objective did this cutting and pasting serve?

Right-side up pic coming soon...

So, the next day in math, I went around and asked the kids.

The kids love them. They like the craftsy aspect of it.  One kid said it reminded him of elementary school, but he said it in a fond way. "But does it help with math?" I asked. They said absolutely, they helped a lot.  As they do problems, they find themselves referring to them all the time.  After class I asked the teacher and she said the same thing.  Before she started doing them, it never occurred to the kids to look back at their notes to figure out how to solve a problem.  She would remind them, but they were unconvinced.  My interpretation is that the kids value the booklets because they've created them, and so are more likely to look back at them than they are to info they've just copied from the board.

Got a kick out of this, posted in my 8th grade cooperating teacher's math class: