Embedded Files
Course Overview
Course Overview
Our elementary math methods course is designed to engage novice teachers in learning about children—who they are and the resources they bring with them into school. Through these lenses we begin to explore how children think about mathematics and how their understandings develop. A grounding principle is that each child comes to school with intuitive understandings of mathematics, and that children's natural approaches to solving problems can form the basis of the math learned in school. Our goal is to support novice teachers to recognize and build from what children know and can do, as opposed to what they lack.
Our approach does not does not focus on the use of particular curricular materials, nor does it prescribe how teachers are to organize their classrooms or implement instruction. Rather, coming to understand research-based frameworks about children's mathematical thinking supports novice teachers to know what to look and listen for in interacting with children, to open opportunities for children to participate, and to make instructional decisions that center children’s ideas.
Children enter school with a great deal of informal or intuitive knowledge of mathematics that can serve as the basis for developing understanding of the mathematics of the primary school curriculum. Without direct instruction on specific number facts, algorithms, or procedures, children can construct viable solutions to a variety of problems. Basic operation of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division can be defined in terms of these intuitive problem-solving processes, and symbolic procedures can be developed as extensions of them.
-Children's Mathematics, p. 4
Instructional Activities
Instructional Activities
What Do You Notice?
How many ways to make ___?
Teacher Educator Reflections
Teacher Educator Reflections
We've built in this intentional work for them to get to know their buddies, but it’s been hard to get them (novice teachers) to actually use what they've learned about children in their math. They might say “he likes soccer” and make the story problem context about that, but they're not really making use of what they know about how how children participate—how their family talks to one another, how they engage with their siblings... It's challenging to get them to take off their school hats. When they’re at school they want to take about school things.
Google Sites
Report abuse