Week 7 Math Reflection 

This week we learned about ALGEBRA! I think in high school, this was my worst nightmare. All the x's and variables confused me to no end but we learned some very important strategies to teach this concept to our students which gave me a breath of fresh air.

We also talked about what strategies we could use to help ELL students (English as a Second Language) in a math classroom. 

Language is important especially to students who are studying English .It can be confusing since our words have so many different meanings and math is a separate language on its own, so I can relate to an ELL student learning Math.

Our first student presentation this week was about patterning using the Fibonacci Spiral.

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I had a hard time following the relationship and how it related to the math concept but none the less I took away strategies if I were to explain this to an ELL student using simple terms and maybe even having a Vocab chart as we introduced new terms.

We also took a look at variables today and our teacher shows us a cool strategy to help explain this to students. Sometimes the variables confuse students because they dont know what to look at. Miss Bunz simply covered the variable and asked us what number plus 8 gives us 10? It helps students become more aware of what they are doing and simplifying the question without having to move the numbers to the left or right of the equation depending on if you needed to add, subtract, multiply or divide. 

We need to be able to understand these concepts before we teach them to our students. If we just come in with basic knowledge and regurgitate it to them, they wont learn anything. Come into the classroom with strategies, tools to help them and real life problems instead of the generic ones found in the math textbooks. Only then will your students thrive and you will get the most from them.