Classroom Visitors

During this past week Patricia Maxwell from the Department of Education had visited our classroom. She brought with her some very useful advice and creative ideas.

Now that I have seen the manipulatives that she brought with her I do recall more of my own memories from primary and elementary school. However, the first object she showed us I was not familiar with. This was a Geoboard. A Geoboard was a large flat square that had pegs on it that formed each smaller unit on the board. The Geoboard can be used for many different concepts and difficulties in a primary or elementary classroom. It can be used for shapes, counting, graphing, and calculating values such as area and primeter.

Next Patricia showed us some fun games you can play with students to make learning math more fun. The first game was a game that was laid out almost like a bingo card. There were several rows and columns of numbers that you needed to connect to get four in a row. At the bottom of the card were the numbers 0-9. You pick two numbers that multiply to give you a number on the card that you want and then the next player has to use one of the previous numbers and can change the other one to get the number they want. This continues until one player connects four numbers that are consecutively placed on the board. This could be used for adding, subtracting, or multiplying. In my own experience I had not encountered this before, the only fun game we used to play was regular bingo. This was for practice of number recognition.

The next game consisted of cards that had numbers written on them and the tens and ones value of another number. You went around the classroom asking who had a certain number that was written on your card in tens and ones and they must respond with their number and then ask the question again. This is done in a round so all students would get a turn.

The next item she showed us was connector blocks or linking cubes. These bring back many memories for me, we used them frequently in school. They are small, square, colored blocks that snap together. They can be used for making patterns, counting, color identification, graphing, 3D shapes, rotations and transformations.

She then showed us a useful webpage that we can use to help students get a better understanding of difficult concepts or just extra practice. This website is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives (http://nlvm/usu.edu/). It can also be used as a tool for demonstration if materials are not available in your school.

I found this to be very helpful, it game me a start in thinking creatively about math and how it can be made more fun for students to enjoy instead of the traditional form of work sheets.

As well last week we got the pleasure of getting a crash course on how a SMART Board works. I have never seen a smart board until this semester and I was amazed to see it in action. With the way technology is changing and having such a diversity of students in each class a SMART Board is definitely the way to go. The learning possibilities are endless.