After my first official year of teaching math, I attempted some writing activities as part of my math lessons. I felt I needed to improve in this for the upcoming year which is why I decided to focus my topic in this area. I also felt that some focus in language would help me as an Intervention Specialist as well. After this class, I feel that I have a variety of tools I can use to encourage the use of math language in speaking and in writing in my classroom.
While researching my project, I noticed that the general theme was writing and speaking the math language increases learning and allows opportunities to show deeper knowledge in math. There is a lot of language in math that we don’t normally use in everyday life so any opportunities to use math language is a good idea. I also discovered that there are a lot of similarities between the writing in math and the writing done in a Language Arts classroom even though the writing is math focused in my classroom. I think that collaboration with the Language Arts teacher on writing will also help me be a better teacher in this area and help our students.
I’m excited to see how this goes for the new school year. I think the variety of tools I found will give different opportunities to use math language than just putting pencil to paper in their math journal, small student group chats and being called on in class.
I appreciate the peer evaluations that I received. While some of my research said variety in writing opportunities is a good thing, my peer feedback thought focusing on a few of the tools might have been better. I really wanted choices so I could change which tool I needed depending on the needs of my students. I am planning on using EdCite to start the year then branching out to my other tools as needed or to keep student focus high for writing and/or speaking tasks. I added some additional details with EdCite on how to create questions, assignments and grading on my website after my feedback as well.