Math talks at home...

As we talk about multi-cultural education and also about math talks, I wonder about the different approaches to solving math problems.  My take-away from the math talks so far, is that any accurate discussion of strategies promotes mathematical literacy: indeed the goal seems to be to tease out a variety of strategies for any one problem.  Nevertheless there also seems to be an emphasis on teaching the language and techniques of the current curriculum, and not to honor the techniques of parents, with the idea being that often parents know the algorithm, but not the reasoning behind it.  Yet, the most powerful math discussion I can imagine is parents and kids sitting down together to sort out why or how an algorithm works, or to convince each other of the validity of the approach taught in school.

Incidentally, it is fun to see the varieties of notation for long division from other countries: long division notation for several countries.

Question of the week: How to engage "high-achieving" students in math?

I expect this week that I will be teaching a math lesson which will be observed by my field mentor.

The standard procedure in my 5th grade math class is:
1.  Whole class direct instruction using provided curriculum
2.  Small groups are called up one by one to work with the teacher, and the other students work on assigned problems from the book.
3.  Those who finish early can use a computer to play online math games or can find a partner and play a paper math game.  The first 6 who finish are allowed to work in the shared space outside the classroom.

The same six always finish first. There are students who work hard and sometimes finish early, but never get to go to the shared space.   The computers are slow to connect to the network, and aren't reliably charged... etc.  There are a lot of reasons why I think this system is inefficient and unfair.

But what do you do with the kids who do finish first?  How do you motivate everyone to work hard, and not reward only those who finish first?  How do you keep the class humming, but ensure that it doesn't get too loud to disrupt the small groups, and those still doing independent work?

That is my question of the week.

Right now my thoughts are towards finding ways for them to work with other students, pushing the ZPD.  Or, pushing them to examine the math concept from multiple perspectives, as we do in math class, and also discussed here.

Jeopardy....

I  used to help the librarian at my daughter's elementary school as she helped the kids study for the Global Reading Challenge.  I read the books and wrote up Q & As on them, and she somehow got the Q&As into a jeopardy game on her computer.  The kids participating in the GRC came to the library, formed teams, and then they played Jeopardy, team against team.  They loved it.

So how do you create a Jeopardy game?  Using Microsoft Powerpoint.  There are a ton of videos on youtube that show you how, but you can also just download a template from Microsoft, and fill in your questions and answers.

Multiplication stars...

I came across a blog which mentioned multiplication stars as a fun way to introduce students to multiplication, and as a first way to practice their multiplication facts. 

In the blog, it shows a picture of a star for 7.  Without really thinking about what I expected it to look like, I tried making one for 9, and then 2 -- and they didn't come out the way I expected, but then when I thought for a moment about why, it was clear that they couldn't come out any other way.  So it was a fun way to look at multiplication from a new angle.

Here's a pdf with an empty multiplication star...

Reflections on fall quarter blogging...

Hmmm.  I enjoyed blogging this quarter.  As we talk about in literacy, it seems more purposeful now, and so more worthwhile. I blog to help me organize my thoughts. I blog because I've seen something cool and I want to remember it. I blog sometimes in order to try to get other's perspective on a question.  Overall, even without an audience, I have found the blogging helpful.

I have about 10 drafts of blogs yet unpublished.  I've stopped thinking about the weekly deadline for class blogs, and instead I publish things as I feel I'm finished processing the event or idea that inspired them, and am ready to share that with the world.  I like this  evolution too.  It feels more genuine to post according to my own internal measure.

At one point I thought i would include a question in each post, in order to elicit feedback.  I found that when I planned in advance to do this, it changed how I wrote the post (once again, echoes of ideas about purpose and audience from literacy class).  I didn't do that consistently though, because not everything lent itself to leaving a question on the table.  I find when reading others posts, I usually agree, but don't have much to add on.  I know too that brevity has become valued as we try to keep up with each other's blogging.  At this point, my blogging is a mix, some short, some long, some with open questions, some more reflective.  

There aren't a lot of comments on my blog.  If I am making 2 comments a week on others blogs, I am not receiving that same number back.  Maybe because of the nature of my blogs, but perhaps also because we are not all managing 2 comments a week.  I know I go in bursts with respect to commenting.   As I've suggested, I find my current style of blogging helpful and useful to me, and while I would be happy to see more feedback, that is not a driving force for me at this point.

My blog from this quarter which I think would be conducive to further conversation and ideas: 

Math foldables 

Fun in Math 

A couple blog posts where I found the discussion interesting:

Flipped classrooms 

Flipped classroom followup 

Translation through the iPad Viewer

One of the coolest apps I’ve seen for the iPad is WordLens, which will translate whatever text it sees through the camera viewer.  I didn’t demo it in class because each translation dictionary costs $5.  I bought the English/Spanish dictionary, but since I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t tell how well it is translating.  Nevertheless, here is a picture of the front page of today’s New York Times, and also one of how WordLens translated it (in real time, directly to the screen), when I hovered the iPad over it.

Museum of the Moving Image

We visited my parents in NYC this weekend, and while we were there we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.  Too bad it's too far for a field trip, because it had a lot of of kid-friendly activities.

In one spot they had still cameras mounted overhead which were pointed down at a flat desk with a marked frame.  On the desk there were cut-outs of characters and props as well as backgrounds to use to make a stop action video. One could position the cut-outs, and then press a button to take a picture.  Once you had a sequence of photos, you could watch your video play back on a screen.

Similarly, in another room, they supplied black paper and scissors so you could make a silhouette stop action animation.  There they used cameras and laptops running iStopAnimation to make the videos.

Zoey is my brother's dog.

Another fun part of the exhibit was the Translation Party.  If you texted a sentence to the given phone number, it would be projected on a wall, then electronically translated to Japanese and projected onto the wall again. Then the Japanese was translated back to English, and then back to Japanese, with each translation projected.  The Translation Party stopped when 2 consecutive English and Japanese translations stayed the same.  Those final versions made no sense.  Maybe digital translation has a ways to go...

Too small to see?