Change Your "Math-itude!"

{This lesson is from a few weeks ago, but I wanted to make sure I shared it with you all}. Recently, I talked to students about "mathitude." I have {shockingly} experienced some negativity towards math in our classroom. (Not too much, I can handle it! :)

I decided to have a quick discussion about "mathitude." I personally love math and the challenge it provides. It is often my favorite subject to teach because I feel it is where you see lightbulbs go off in students' understanding and, with a little practice and hard work, children can get better at things they originally did not understand. I guess I'm saying, the learning process is more visible in math and that makes it exciting and motivating for me as a teacher.

I started by asking students to complete the following chart:

After students shared ideas for each side of the chart, I shared comments that I pulled from the parent questionnaires that you all completed at the beginning of the year. It was so interesting for me to see some of the same comments about math pop up again and again. You may notice some of your hopes for your child's math growth this year:

I think students really enjoyed seeing this list that I could say was collectively from our "parents." I'm excited to watch each child grow in perseverance and understanding that math is a learning process--not always something that they should be able to do immediately. In my math lessons, I aim for deeper understanding and try my best to answer the "why do I need to know this" question.

Since having the "mathitude" discussion with students, I think our attitude has changed. We have also begun stations where students encounter challenging and fun problems to solve, hands-on lessons with me, and games with a partner or group. If we need to, we will return to this list to make sure we remember the goals that we have for math this year. Thank you for being a partner in this work with me!

Place Value Houses

Building and engineering in math class?!?! What?!

Last week, students were challenged to build place value houses in teams of four. Students had to use 100's blocks, 10's sticks, and one's cubes to build houses with a given value. To make the task a little more challenging, students did not have the exact number of hundreds blocks they needed to make their houses. They had to use 10's sticks or find another way to get their house to equal the correct value. Later, we made houses with greater values. Check out the amazing, creative work they did:

 

 Super CREATIVE!