How do you find the parents of your students? Are they helping their children to learn, or are they more of a hindrance? Some parents can be incredibly difficult to cope with, of course. And sometimes an assertive manner and explaining the boundaries between their opinions and your professional work is called for.
What are pseudocontexts, and should K-6 math teachers be concerned about them? I came across the term in Dan Meyer's excellent blog, in which he explores better ways of engaging students in learning math, and calls out "fake math" and poor teaching.
Are you getting a little tired of other people interfering in how you teach in your classroom? I see around the world teachers being put under greater and greater pressure to perform, as if they were mere employees or servants of the state. And I'm over it!
Do you use technology as much as you'd like to help your K-6 students understand math? How do students respond to tech? Would they actually prefer old school resources? Have you started using Snapchat yet? Would you like daily K-6 math videos to start conversations? Follow me: petes_classroom
In the busyness of classroom teaching, do you find math lessons becoming a bit stale? Are textbook lessons getting you and your students down a bit? I believe that students crave interesting, relevant lessons, especially in math. How can we provide such lessons? It’s a simple idea: find real math going on in […]
Have you ever felt like banging your head on the wall when trying to get kids to learn something? Do you feel you're not up to the task of "getting through to these kids" and making them learn something?
Do you wonder about the wisdom of sending math homework home? Have you ever had a sneaky suspicion that parents may actually not be helping their kids learn math?
Teachers recently told us, of all the K-6 math topics in the curriculum, which one they would most like help with. Care to guess which topic came to the top of the list? Most Challenging K-6 Math Topic The “winner”: Place value. Close behind? Operations, followed by Number facts. Since these three broad topics form […]
From today onward, I will not apologize for expecting students to memorize the times tables. And nor should you.
Infants as young as six months recognize interesting shapes. And babies who show higher spatial reasoning skills do better in math at age four. This is good news for parents and carers who purposefully try to help their children understand the world around them in explicitly mathematical ways...
Indigenous students in Australia typically lag two years behind other kids in math. How can teachers connect indigenous kids with classroom math? A new approach proposed by Dr Chris Matthews incorporates story telling and dance as ways to connect students' interests and culture with math.
The recent national census really caught the attention of the Australian populace, mostly for all the wrong reasons. The official website couldn't cope with the traffic to the site on "census night", which was entirely predictable, and at the same time it was subjected to several "Denial of Service" (DOS) attacks. But apart from that, what can we teach children about censuses? Here are a few ideas:
Are there kids in your class that you just don't "get"? Do you teach students who you feel will never amount to much? The video that prompted this week's blog is an interview between Larry King and Gary Vaynerchuk. Chances are, you're not much like Gary Vee. And nor am I. If you're like most teachers, you were good at school, you were good at following the rules, and you worked hard to figure out the educational system and succeeded at it. The system is designed to reward such behaviour, with academic awards, good grades and ultimately a pathway to a good job.
Standing in the Rain, Teaching: Video Rain gauges measure rainfall by collecting a small sample and measuring how deep the water is. The trouble is, we are interested in very small units – in the metric system, rainfall is measured in millimetres/millimeters. How can you accurately measure such small amounts? How can we use everyday […]
