I think a lot. When I need to solve a problem, I don't necessarily focus on the problem but it is always cooking in the back of my brain. Curriculum and how to teach integers so my students really understand them have been perking back there all week. I watched the TED talk and have talked to co-workers. One of my fellow teachers was commenting that the students had no idea of how to connect what they read to their experiences. Those were the spices in my stew this week.
It is a snow day today (we are adding days in June at this point) and I just got back from cross country skiing. I was skiing along a flat straight section and thinking about connecting and integers and thought of shoes. When subtracting integers, zero pairs ( a positive and a negative) are vital to the understanding but my students are still confused as to when they need them. They have experience with shoes and that they must be in pairs to be useful. I need to try it on them but I am wondering if we talk about adding left shoes and right shoes and how many left over shoes we have that might help them with the addition. With the subtraction, I could ask for left shoes or right shoes so they would have to add in some pairs of shoes to give me what I am asking for. We could even use their shoes to do the problems.
Integers are part of my curriculum and I want my students to understand how they work so that when they take algebra they don't make so many mistakes. It hasn't really worked for me yet. I have yet to send students to 8th grade who can still add and subtract integers when they get there. I need to teach this concept but how and when I teach them are up to me as the teacher. After watching the TED Talk, maybe what I should do is ask the students how to add and subtract using their shoes. I think I will and let you know how it came out next week. Wish me luck!
C, this sounds like you are trying out the last question you posed in your first blog post...which is more important...the written curriculum or its implementation. I think you have an answer here.
ReplyDeleteI also like the way that you are involving your students...by using something they know about. And by working together.
(I was also interested in your thought processes and how you came to all of this. And you've spurred me on to get out and try out some of this great snow today!)
I like the shoe idea! I do some "Hands On Equations" work with 4th graders, and, while some of them pretty quickly glom onto the idea of a positive and a negative as a zero pair, others don't. I could have them all throw their shoes in a basket, take out a few of one side or the other, and have them take out the pairs....I'll have to think more about this!
ReplyDeleteI have used the shoes with my students and they thought it was a lot of fun. I started out trying to let them come up with a way for it to work but it was predicated on using a "pair" of shoes. Until I said that the shoes needed to be a pair they were all over the place. We finally decided the right shoe was positive and the left negative and had fun with it after that. I found it interesting that all three classes made the right shoe positive. I wonder why? The other thing they really liked was I didn't make them put their shoes back on!
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