With Family Math Night coming up next week, about to start iReady mid-year assessments, and tears in our house last week over math facts, I have had math on the brain! Thanks to Julie Rondinelli, I think she was the one who recommended this math podcast that I tuned into last week: Rounding Up, A Math Learning Center podcast. The episode I listened to last week was called "The Big Place Value Episode." You can listen to it here or read the transcript. What stuck with me was the notion, or really the reminder, that math is all about relationships. Helping kids to see the connections between numbers. Helping kids see that numbers can be bundled to make a new set of numbers. Helping kids to see the connection when trying to remember the six or seven times tables. (That might have been what was bringing on tears in our house last week.) I have one child who sees those connections in his head. He has a strong number sense. Equivalent fractions are a piece of cake for him right now. I have another child who I am dreading when she is working with fractions next year. Those connections don't come as easy for her and then you compound that with a lack of confidence in her math ability. So how do help those kids? For me, it helped to find a YouTube video where someone had rewritten a Taylor Swift song to help practice 6s and to hopefully start getting the pattern to sink in. I also went and asked chatGPT to give me some good points to share about math and number relationships:
We talk a lot about the importance of connecting with our students. Our theme for this year is "Constructing Stories, Building Connections." Just as we strive to build strong connections with our students, fostering relationships between mathematical concepts such as numbers, patterns, and operations can significantly enhance our students' understanding of math. Think about how you can continue to connect the mathematical dots for our students, how you can help them see the bigger picture of math, how we can help them appreciate the beauty that can be found in the relationships and patterns. How can we empower them, all of them, the ones who easily see the connections and the ones who don't, to become confident, capable mathematicians? I read some more of the new picture books that we received from Bookelicious. These were all part of the kindness collection I ordered. Here are the titles: Something, Someday, All Kinds of Special, A Good Deed Can Grow, and The Heart of a Whale. I am also reading a novel in verse with my daughter, Rez Dogs, a book about a girl stuck with her grandparents on the reservation during the pandemic.
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