The first day of the math workshop, The Best Current Strategies for Teaching Math: Computation, sponsored by the Piedmont Triad Education Consortium of North Carolina, was fun and practical. About 150 teachers from all grade levels were in attendance today at the Greensoboro Coliseum Pavillion Center, where Don Fraser, a teacher, speaker, and consultant from Toronto entertained, educated, and generally impressed the heck out of us all with his wit and humor as he demonstrated different ways to teach traditional computational skills.
He introduced ideas he had created himself during his years as a teacher, and borrowed others' ideas, expanding upon them, showing us how we can use them in novel ways. Other ways to add and subtract that might confuse one person but seem crystal clear to another certainly reminded me that not everyone approaches a math problem the same way. He demonstrated identifying place value with a card game, how to use your fingers to multiply sixes and sevens (similar to the trick of doing nines). I had been looking for a finger trick for sixes and sevens... can't wait to teach it to my kids.
He gave us a 50-page packet of strategies that we can copy and use in our classrooms to teach any kind of computations, including games and activities that give the kids relevant practice of finding range, median, mean, and mode, and other number games, finding equivalent fractions, looking for number pattern, and much more.
I'm looking forward to the one he's presenting tomorrow which focuses on Problem Solving. I'm going to be a better math teacher, and I'm going to try to adopt his affable sense of humor. I'd like my kids to laugh as they learn like we did today.
1 comment:
Bea do you think that the package is for sale to the public? Does it expalin difficult math ? let me know ! I want to hear what your fvorite game was too cool! I've beenw ondering about those love,nat
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