CTGE 5227 Personal Learning Path

 For my final blog post, I wanted to take some time to reflect upon my personal learning path. I started off this semester feeling extremely uncomfortable with teaching fractions and understanding different mathematical concepts involving fractions. In school, I never felt like I could quite grasp fractions and I also had some not-so-great experiences with a teacher mocking our intelligence as a class because we were having trouble understanding fractions. Even when I stepped into my student teaching classroom and found out the class was learning about fractions, I got really nervous. But now, I feel very confident in my abilities to understand and teach about fractions. After watching my cooperating teacher teach it to the class, having opportunities to teach students and review in small groups, and through this course and my research, I am very proud to say fractions now come easy to me (at least fractions at a 4th-grade level). I've learned how to find the GCF and LCM, how to co...

 This past week, we started introducing measuring angles to students. We had them do a few angles identifying questions (are the angles right, acute, or obtuse?) and then we had them practice measuring angles with a protractor and how that's done. They seemed to do really well with that and knowing which degree numbers to read based on if the angle is acute or obtuse. Starting today, however, we introduced them to finding out angle measurements using fractions. We started off with this problem involving a clock: We taught them that no matter how big or small a circle is, the total amount of degrees it equals is 360. Once they got that concept down, they knew that 360 degrees is the whole. We then showed them how you can divide the clock (or circle up) into 4 pieces because you could draw a line at every 3rd number. We then were able to come up with the equation 360/4=n. After dividing we know that n=90degrees. Once they felt comfortable with this, we had them move on to these next ...

 For my math concept game, I was actually given this idea by a substitute teacher at the school I'm student teaching in! It is called WHO'S THE IMPOSTER? featuring the online game Among Us that I'm sure many young students are familiar with. If you are not familiar with Among Us, essentially it is an online game where you play as 1 of 10 crewmates aboard a spaceship, all responsible for certain tasks. Among the crewmates, there is an imposter, who is trying to take over the spaceship. Through meetings and deliberation, the other crewmates must figure out who the imposter is and kick them off the ship before it's too late. It is up to the imposter to convince the other crewmates that they are innocent. It has become an extremely popular game For this math concept game, students are asked to solve adding and subtracting fractions equations through several activities and keep track of their findings on their notes sheet seen below  For the first activity, students must sol...

 This week students started learning how to read line plots. First, they started looking at line plots with just whole numbers and learned how they are to be read, different vocabulary that goes along with line plots, and how we solve to find certain data. Soon, we went into line plots with fractions like the one seen below: It seemed that adding in fractions along with the whole numbers stumped a few students, even though all the concepts of reading the line plot remained the same. There were several questions accompanying this line plot that also stumped a few students, especially the question below: A lot of students saw the mixed number and their brains immediately jumped back to the previous lesson on how to subtract mixed numbers. They ended up getting 1 and 1/4 as their answer, which I found interesting that they were able to bring in their prior knowledge, even though the answer was wrong. We had to redirect them a few times and explain that we need to look at the number of...