Building Positive Mathitudes

  One of the readings entitled Making Math Children Will Love focused on children’s attitudes toward mathematics. The article suggest that in general, many children have negative attitudes towards math because they feel that mathematics is difficult, boring, unrewarding, and mostly irrelevant. It is important for us, as educators to recognize these attitudes and try to change them to a more positive experience for children, so that their attitudes and achievements in mathematics are progressive. Dr. Lynda Colgan suggests “ we as educators, must turn our attention to resources and strategies that improve students’ relationship with mathematics content and processes and pique students’ motivation, emotion, interest and attention”( Colgan, 2014).  This is something that really stood out to me upon reading this article, as I truly believe that as educators we can make math exciting and fun for all of our students, we just have to find different ways to try and engage them. If educators can create non-traditional approaches, that spark interest and curiosity in mathematics, then I believe that students will become more engaged and will gain an appreciation for mathematics.

    In the classroom this week, we learned about the importance of blended learning. We had the opportunity to visit different stations in the classroom that allows us to explore and find out more about blended learning. I found that I was quite intrigued by the idea of blended learning because I wasn’t able to engage in this much in my learning experience.  Upon exploring the topic of blended learning, I found a few classroom strategies that I would like to use in my placement.

  Student Centers:  Student centers can be effective with blended learning in mathematics because they can provide your students with differentiated instruction through blended learning.  At some stations students that may be struggling could have the opportunity to strengthen their skills and work with the teacher or use Internet sites tailored to mathematical instruction to develop their skills. Other stations could have students work individually or in small groups with a variety of interactive technology based learning programs.

  Flipping the Classroom: This strategy reverses the traditional teacher instructed classroom and involves students watching online lectures or collaborating in online discussions to carry out research.  Typically the research would be done at home and students would return to school and engage in concepts in the classroom with the guidance of their own teacher.

https://goo.gl/27d3F3

  I am looking forward to applying blended learning in my own classroom for many reasons. One of the main reasons is because I never had the opportunity to experience something like this when I was in grade school and I think that it would have had a positive effect on my learning. Another reason is that I want to create fun and interest in mathematics and I think that blended learning will promote student engagement for many students that may negative attitudes towards math because it provides them with the opportunity to have differentiated instruction that is new and exciting and will it hopefully they will gain an appreciation for mathematics.

https://goo.gl/aiSvbD