Writing

The past few weeks in class we have been looking at reading strategies and exploring how we can incorporate them into our different content areas. This week we bagan looking at writing strategies. In math, we probably won't do a lot of "essay writing," but I do like the idea of having students write out explanations when they are solving problems. By doing this, I of course am implementing that literacy component, but it also shows me that my students understand what they are doing. If they can  explain to me how they got the answer, then I know they understand the concept and they will most likely be able to do it in the future.

In middle school, math class starts to pick up speed. Students are expected to build on their basic math skills, memorize formulas, and learn step procedures for solving problems. Flow charts are commonly used as a pre-writing strategy, but they can also be great in math when learning step procedures. For example, see the picture below of a flow chart used to guide a student through factoring quadratic equations.