Miss. Malatesta's Math Blog

Hello all, thanks for coming back and visiting my blog, you must really love my math content! This week I will be talking about making mistakes and trying new things in math, as well as teaching math to various learners within our classrooms.  Making Mistakes: I believe that it is extremely important as an educator to teach students that making mistakes is okay. We are all human and we all make mistakes… Yes, I know everyone especially students, think teachers are perfect, and always make it known when they are wrong because… WHEN do teachers make mistakes?!? This is something that needs to be viewed as okay, I think that more educators need to teach students that making mistakes challenges your brain to think a new way, especially in mathematics. Students should be given problems and with partners be asked to solve the problems in any way they feel fit. If they make mistakes, so be it, try again, and again until you think you’ve got it!  This will build their conf...

Welcome back to my math blog! This week, we learned about perception and Pat explained to us how this can be taught from such a young age. Perception in math is often how you are able to view things such as 3-D objects and shapes pieced together as a whole. This is something that I have gotten better at over time, but surprisingly, the thing that has helped me is my students! Children now a days are often playing with Lego, building things on Minecraft or other video games, and are able to build spatial sense and perception skills that much of my generation does not have.  This year during my second teaching block I had a PD Day, where we dealt with math. One of the topics of the day dealt with spatial sense. I noticed as soon as most educators were shown the problem they had to solve, most immediately stated “I am not good at this stuff”. Together the teachers in my group worked with all our minds to solve the problem. It seemed that this was something we all had diffic...

Welcome all educators to my math blog! I have just begun my second-year mathematics class at Brock University wit Pat McEarchren. So far from the moment we entered the class, I knew it was going to be a good one! She brought cookies to class! What a way to make people love math. Anyways, Pat in the first class was able to go through an ice breaker activity (I know, your thinking…. OMG I hate icebreakers) but, this was like no other. Pat gave us all a sheet where we had to go around the room and find someone who did what was mentioned in each section. Some things were; speaks another language, goes to Starbucks regularly, has kids, etc… this was an activity that I will take with me to my future classrooms, especially if I am fortunate enough to teach high school. It was different from regular icebreakers, got the students up and moving around, and allowed them to learn things about one another that they probably didn’t already know.       Moving on to Mat...