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Actively Engaging in Reflective Practice as an Educator

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  Hello everyone and welcome to my final blog! Although I have thoroughly enjoyed creating this blog for all of you, it had to come to an end eventually. This may be the end of the blog, but it will not be the end of reflective practice for me! As an aspiring teacher, we have been advised of the benefits of reflective practice and how it will make you a better educator. These blogs were one form of reflective practice for me and I will ensure I keep practicing reflection in a variety of different methods. Ensure you continue to do the same and track how it has improved your practice! As educators our pedagogy will continually develop as we go through our career. Since I am the student who is actively engaged with school and ensures I do all of my homework, I used to assume everyone was the same. After going into my placement and observing students, it began apparent to me that I was wrong. I pondered this idea and reflected on how this may shift the way I structure my classroom. I ...
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How coding can used for RC Cars

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  Hello my fellow blog readers! Today I have a very different and special blog for you! A guest speaker who is a math consultant was brought in and introduced a variety of new manipulatives I’ve never used before. Many of them had to do with coding which was a new concept for me when I entered post secondary. If you weren’t aware, the mathematics curriculum has been updated to include coding in mathematics. Many of the tools I will showcase below could be implemented into the classroom as we adapt to the world of coding. The first thing the math consultant introduced us to was an activity called leapfrog. If you are unsure of the math problem I’d suggest googling before you continue reading this blog! In summary you have x amount of chairs (has to be odd greater than 3) and x-1 frogs. The frogs will be split into two groups with one starting on each side and must switch sides. The only way they can move is in an open spot next to them or by hopping over a member on the other team. ...
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How Advertising Can Be Misleading/ Probability in the World

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  Welcome back my fellow math educators and readers!  As promised last week, I’ve made sure to include visuals and my best joke yet to make up for last week! I have attached the joke of the week below for your entertainment: I really liked this week as we discussed probability and expanded upon our lessons to focus on real world applications. The first activity we did today was presented by my colleague Gagan on how advertising can be misleading, but we can use mathematics to debunk these advertisements. Her activity was derived from the following Grade 12 probability expectation: explain how the media, the advertising industry, and others (e.g., marketers, pollsters) use and misuse statistics (e.g., as represented in graphs) to promote a certain point of view (e.g., by making general statements based on small samples; by making statements using general population statistics without reference to data specific to minority groups). Media is a very powerful resource for business...
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Trigonometry in The World

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  Good Morning Readers! We are back at it today and are going to look at a variety of activities that focus on grade 10 and 11 trigonometry. Before we get into the fun stuff a little math joke wouldn’t hurt no one Q: Why do math teachers love parks so much? A: Because of all the natural logs!!! Unfortunately I had no visuals for this week's joke of the day but will make sure I have one for next week's blog. Let's dive into the first activity my college Allen developed! Allen was assigned the following grade 10 trigonometry expectation: solve problems involving similar triangles in realistic situations. He developed an activity where he made specific base triangles out of paper. The most common triangle we used had two side lengths of 1” and the hypotenuse was 2” in length. We would then use this triangle and its angles of elevation, as well as the base distance from the water bottle to the end of the triangle to estimate the bottle's height. It was a neat activity that ...
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Linear and Quadratic Functions

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  Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog! I know I took a bit of time off but we’re back in full swing! It wouldn’t be a warm welcome back without the joke of the day so here it is: This week will be a little different from last semester as I will be shifting the focus of my blogs to focus on lessons and explorations that my peers have constructed. We as a class engaged in micro activities and provided feedback to improve them. I will be sharing with you some of those activities and how YOU can use them as a part of your classroom instruction.  For the first week we will be focusing on a lesson I prepared to help students create connections between the equation of a linear function, its table of values and visual representation of the line. At this point students would have been exposed to linear equations and its table of values and the following exercise will be used to tie them all together. For the minds portion of my lesson I used a card sort activity. Students were g...
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Becoming Your Own Questioner

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  How’s it going today fellow bloggers and readers? Today is bittersweet as it will be my last blog until the new year. We got an action packed blog today so let's jump right into it! Becoming Your Own Questioner In mathematics we are constantly being asked questions to solve, but at the same time we are questioning the question. For example, when I see a problem one of the first things I ask myself is “What’s going on here?” or “what is this question asking me to do?”. Before we get too in depth, we need to know the different types of questions we ask. There are ‘specific questions’ that are asking you about something specific. There are also open ended questions that don’t have exactly one answer but can be thought about in a multitude of different ways. As students are problem solving, we want them to ask the right questions in order to identify the solution. So how do we as educators teach students to become their own effective questioner? Let’s look at an example: After read...
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The Importance of an Internal Monitor

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  Welcome back math bloggers! Today we’re going to discuss the idea of “developing an internal monitor” and the importance of connecting curriculum expectations with real life examples. As always we will begin with the math joke of the day! “Developing an Internal Monitor” when Problem Solving Today's problem was presented by my colleagues Dayton, Madison, Gagan and Allen. Their problem asked us to start with a 2 x 1 couch and find a way to move the couch in such a manner that it will be right beside its original position and be facing the same direction. The only catch was that it was extremely heavy and could only be moved 90 degrees on any of the corners. This problem was very engaging with a low floor high ceiling since there were multiple ways to solve it. Many of us ran up to the board to start writing, but one group stayed sitting and began to work out the problem with manipulatives (Using their phone as the rectangle and moving it). I took a different approach and immedia...
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