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.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
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.
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I agree that in math class there is not a lot of writing essays for assignments. However, it is nice to know that literacy can be taught in a math classroom. I like the idea of these reading and writing strategies in the everyday math classroom. Great read!
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah!
ReplyDeleteI agree that having your students write out the math problem will not only help them to better understand the problem, but if that student ever had a question, you could easily look a their work in order to find the problem. Quadratic equations are difficult for any student to learn, so to be able to see step by step how your students got the answer, and why, it will speed up the learning process.
I really like the idea of explaining in words how you solved the problem. I don't think I ever had to do that in my math classes. I was always bad at math. I wish teachers would have implemented things like this in their classroom because I feel like I could've explained it better than just showing it in my work.
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