Miss Younger's Math Musings
I have chosen to look at refining my favourite unit on The Salish Sea and Great Bear Rainforest two unique ecosystems on the BC Coast. This is a unit that always brings me a lot of joy as my favourite places on the planet are found within the Salish Sea and Great Bear Rainforest. For…
I first heard the term Low Threshold – High Ceiling ( LTHC) tasks a few years ago in an afterschool workshop on getting students talking in socials and science. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, I was a first-year teacher and getting my feet wet with so many things it was…
We all know that attitude is everything in life. Our mindset and outlook influence our path forward and success, there is a large body of research on mindset and math attitudes from influential educators including Jo Bolar ( https://www.youcubed.org/). Early in the school year I try to determine where my student’s attitudes towards math lie,…
I have chosen to adapt a task from Aboriginal Perspectives at the University of Regina this fabulous resource was shared with me by our Aboriginal Support Worker at my school. The resource has many samples of math problems that support authentic and culturally sensitive first people’s perspectives and the BC math curriculum. It was important to…
This is another place where rich math tasks and low threshold high ceiling activities give all students the opportunity to shine and explore. This activity could be extended and built upon for gifted students. The activity below could be extended using drawings, manipulatives or equations depending on what works best for the student. The activity…
I began my first teacher blog in 2014 as a student teacher with my domain name. It chronicled my practicum year and my first months in the classroom. As I’m posting to this blog I am reflecting on how much I have learned since I last posted to that blog in 2017. Reading my old…
“Play isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.” (Mraz, Porcelli, & Tyler, 2016) I really feel that games are an important part of math class and great for practicing skills and building fact fluency. As humans we are hard wired to play and the need to incorporate play has been written about by many authors. One…
My grade group often talks about how overwhelming it can be to attempt to cover all of the material in math especially this year with students having heightened anxiety levels and gaps in their mathematical background. As a grade group we are in the process of determining which topics are most important. We have also…
I strongly identified with the work of Peter Liljedahl as it immediately struck me as the type of learners, I want my students to be, motivated, curious, self-directed thinkers. It also reminded me of the work of the Critical Thinking Consortium whose ideas I was exposed to as an education student at UBC and have…
As adults much of our experience with practicing math facts was in “mad minute drills” timed tests that were useless at best and anxiety inducing at worst. I remember being in grade 4 the grade I currently teach and feeling like an utter failure because I only completed 30 of the 60 problems on my…
