CTGE 5227 Personal Learning Path

 As my student teaching continues, I am finding myself becoming much more confident in my ability to teach fractions. Some students in the class are still struggling with creating equivalent fraction and simplifying fractions, so my cooperating teacher has let me review and teach in small groups with specific students. We are using the rainbow method of finding the factors of the numerator and denominator in order to find the Greatest Common Factor. Some students are still struggling with that as well since some of their multiplication skills are a bit weak. After we work through that, we circle our GCF and divide our fraction by it. I remind them "whatever I do to the top, I do to the..."  "bottom" they say "Whatever I do to the bottom I do to the...." "top" they say I like to see that they actually understand what to do. I then ask them what our new numerator and our new denominator is. It takes them a second to figure out the division but they...

 A topic of math that I find myself being a bit uncomfortable with is fractions. I remember dreading them in school and even having my 3rd-grade teacher yell at the class for not understanding. Given my lack of proficiency with fractions, I don't feel the most comfortable having to teach about them to students. This is something I would definitely love to change as the semester progresses. Funny enough, I just started my student-teaching placement in a 4th-grade classroom and what are they focusing on right now for math? Fractions! Right now they are learning how to simplify fractions using the Greatest Common Factor, create equivalent fractions, and see if fractions are greater than, less than, or equal to one another by cross multiplying. Soon they will learn how to add and subtract fractions with the same and different denominators. I've already started learning so much in just a short amount of time and I'm already starting to feel a bit more comfortable. I've also ...