Resource Blog #3

The resource that I found this week was very exciting to look through! Although all of the resources are not open for me to use at the time, I got to look around and see all of the things that Freckle can offer students and teachers. Freckle is a free site with a premium version offered. My access was currently limited because you are required to claim a school before all of Freckle’s resources can be unlocked. Once unlocked, this site has ELA, Social Studies, Science, and Math material on it, with the standards for each available as well. Because it allows you to choose what grade level you need, this site can offer assignments that align to the standards of which grade you teach. Along with that, this site even allows you to include your roster and school so that you can receive reports on how each student is mastering the work completed while online. Within the math content area, this tool provides ways for student to practice math skills and standards, build fact fluency, and apply math to real world contexts. I believe this tool would be very useful as I teach math because it provides many resources that all fall under the standards that I could use for in-class assessments as well as assign homework.

Website: https://www.freckle.com/

Word count: 220

Synthesis Blog #3

In this chapter we got to see and be reminded of how textbooks have been used in the classroom in the past and how we can better utilize them in our classrooms in the future. Growing up in a classroom environment where textbooks were heavily used to assign homework and to teach from, I understand all too well the feeling that students have when they are assigned to read from a textbook. There’s always a sense of dread because the number of pages assigned, the lofty language, and the swirling ideas that never seem to fully connect. Knowing these things, it’s very temping to want to toss the textbooks out the window and determine not to use them at all, but then I remember hearing my parents complain about my siblings’ lack of a textbook in their math classes the last few years. They wanted to be able to understand the math concepts too in order to help my siblings. Because my content area is math, these comments have really stuck with me, and after reading the chapter for this week, I really do believe that their can be an effective way to use textbooks in the math classroom. I believe, regarding instruction and teaching within the classroom, that notes from my teacher have always been the most helpful, and these have always proven to be useful when doing my homework. I think that the textbook is effectively used when I am assigned homework from the text out of a specific section. I think the difficult part for the teacher comes in when deciding which problems to assign and which topics to focus on out of a large and daunting piece of text. I think this is the tricky part once you look at the standards and the amount of information given to cover in the textbook, which often closely relates to standardized tests. (word count: 314)

Resource Blog #2

Hey guys! So, for my resource this week, I found an activity from the National Geographic Education website. It is titled “Save the Plankton, Breathe Freely” and has students discuss oxygen resources, participate in data collection within a group, and analyze their findings. After, the class can come together to discuss findings and how their findings relate to our lives right now. This course material can be used in a math classroom or a science classroom, and although maybe not primarily used in a Social Studies classroom, this activity could be used to connect lessons about geography and environmental awareness to the hard sciences and mathematics.  I think that this activity would be a really fun way to connect math to real-world and current issues. It is designed for grades 3^rd-5^th, but I believe it could be a fun intro activity for middle school grades as well. This is a neat activity for students to engage with one another through group work and share their findings as a class. It can also provide students with the ability to think critically about their environment and the ways mathematics can be used in other fields to solve or recognize problems in our world. What a better way to connect math, science, and social sciences than through discussing the air that we all breathe!

Website: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/

(Word Count: 221)

Help for Struggling Readers

The title of the chapter we were instructed to read was “How to Help Struggling Readers”. I was excited and intrigued when I read this title because that was what I had been asking myself so far in this course. I understood quickly with our first reading that students who struggle with reading have such a difficult time with most of other subjects because of how necessary it is for a student to be literate in all subjects taught to them. With this new knowledge, I was quick to desire to learn about strategies and solutions that would help students in my classroom as much as possible.

This chapter of the book lays out six helpful tools to use with students, and I can really see how they would each be helpful to students who are struggling with reading. The first strategy was titled “Create Supportive Relationships”. If I am honest, this is the strategy that I get most excited about utilizing in the classroom. We recently have read about the impact that teachers’ and students’ attitudes can have on students’ learning in our EMAT course. The article that we read talked about the overall idea that students develop and learn more when they believe they can improve. The contracting mindset is that students are incapable of being smarter or learning more. This mindset leaves students frustrated and stuck in a state of disobedience, indifference, and contempt for learning and fighting through educational struggles to gain a better understanding of the subject at hand. As both articles state, I believe that when a teacher comes into the classroom showing students that they believe they can succeed, real growth in attitude and learning can occur.

Another big thing that stuck out to me as I was reading this chapter was the fact that I am unsure of how to apply some of these principles practically in a math content area. The biggest question I had about this surrounded the strategy titled “promote self-monitoring”. My main questions would be: “What does self-monitoring look like in math?” and “How can you teach this to students as you present regularly planned material?”. Do you guys have any thoughts? (Word Count: 364)