CAS

January 16, 2020 Day 8 Today unfortunately is my last day :( I hope that today goes well so that I don’t leave them on a bad note. By now the day is over and I worked with them on money and I was surprised at how many of them there were that didn’t know the names of the coins. I played the same game with them as yesterday. (Telling them to add up to $1.50 and having them show me different ways to do it) and I had all the classics from yesterday 6 quarters, 15 dimes, 150 pennies, 3 half dollars, 2 half dollars and 2 quarters. I had a bunch of struggles with them again today with them remembering which coin was which. I eventually came up with “the smallest coin has the smallest name” unfortunately that one wasn't super clear as many of the kids thought that I meant smallest value. And even more unfortunately I had such a hard time finding any tricks that the kids could use to remember the coins aside from the obvious one quarter is one quarter of a dollar. Unfortunately they di...

January 15, 2020 Day 7 Today was another arts day which was annoying since I only had until 9:15 to work with the kids. However even though I only had a small amount of time to work with them, I still was able to accomplish a lot of stuff. This morning I worked with Mia, Lilia, and Taylor on money. We started with remembering the names of the coins and how much each of them are worth. I then gave them an assortment of coins and had them name all of the coins and tell me how much money it was. Once they got good at that I moved on to flashcards that had coins on them (basically the same thing but they liked it better because they got to hold on to the flashcard when they got it correct.) After that we moved on to the final phase of their training and I went around the circle and had each person tell me a way to get $1.50. We started with Mia saying 6 quarters, then the next person said 2 half dollars and 2 quarters, then we got 15 dimes, 150 pennies 3 half dollars, and then Mia gave...

January 14, 2020 Day 6 Today the kids started off their morning with PF class and during that time I worked with Ms. Taj to learn the Large Bead Frame (similar to an abacus). I am absolutely amazed at how simple and helpful it is. I cannot begin to comprehend why others don't use it to teach math. When the kids came back from PF I worked with 3 of them on a short little “assessment” on how well they knew how to use the Large Bead Frame. The first was very good at it right off the bat, the second struggled and I had to work with her for awhile to get her better at it (unfortunately she still doesn’t completely get it). And when I was giving problems to the third one I felt terrible. The first problem that I gave to her ended with the answer being 14,236 and she told me that the answer was 1 ten thousand, 4 thousands, 2 hundreds, 3 tens and 6 ones. When I asked her how else you would say it (using 8,328 as an example, how you could say it as 8 thousands, 3 hundreds, 2 tens and ...

January 13, 2020 Day 5 Today I started the morning working with kids on how to multiply and divide fractions with unlike denominators. It was such an enjoyable day right from the start as the kids actually got it super quickly!! Once I realized that they knew what they were doing I taught some of them how to cross-reduce and they really enjoyed it and got quite good at it. For probably the first time, I was glad for Ms. Hampton’s (My math teacher at my old school) little song that she gave us to remember how to divide fractions. “Dividing Fractions is easy as pie, just flip the second and multiply” When I was in middle school, she would not stop drilling that song into our heads over and over and over again. So… I taught it  to them, it was helpful but I made sure not to be repetitive with it as she was because then it simply gets too annoying and you begin to dislike it. The kids that I taught today were a combination of students that got it right away and students that I ha...

January 10, 2020 Day 4 Day four, and they still haven’t learned how to divide and that’s making things… difficult. So today I taught kids about Equivalent Fractions and they had a... struggle to say the least. That is definitely something that I will need more practice with teaching that in order to come up with clearer descriptions of how they work. Luckily they had great materials that I could use to teach them. They had little pie slices that I used to show how the size of  2 ⅛ added up to equal ¼ and to show how they were equivalent. Unfortunately it took a VERY long time to get them to sort of understand it. Today I also taught them how to factor some more and then I worked with a few kids on multiplying fractions with unlike denominators and that was certainly a breath of fresh air. The kids got it very quickly and I was able to work with many students because of how quickly they got it. Unfortunately the cooking class didn’t come to the Bissonnet campus today so I had t...

January 9, 2020 Day 3 Today the class that I am with had art/music/PF class in the morning so I only had from 8:30- 9:15 to work with the kids however even this tiny amount of time was really quite helpful. Today in the morning I worked with a kid on rounding (The same thing I did on my first day there). In the 45 minutes that I had I was able to teach her about the same amount of things that I was able to teach them on the entirety of my first day JUST 45 MINUTES! Even though that was literally all I did today for my J-Term (Unfortunately the Art of Cooking bus had to leave before I had a chance to work with them at all after lunch. Today felt like such a waste though because I spent all of it with Art of Cooking. Buuuuut, I made some great steak! I am kind of disappointed in how things worked out and I feel really bad for letting the teacher down and not being there today and tomorrow I will have to leave on the bus at 11:30 so I will not be able to teach in the afternoon Toda...

January 8, 2020 Day 2 Today I helped kids work with factors and I again I expected too much of them. I keep on just assuming that they know things, such as division and that ends up turning around on me when halfway through the lesson they finally made it clear to me that they didn’t know division. The kids today took far longer to teach due to no fault of their own but just because I could not figure out how to explain factors to them AT ALL. I never realized how difficult of a task it is for teachers to explain things to students and how hard it is to even begin to explain even semi complex topics without visual aids. All this did was further my appreciation for the materials that they use in Montessori mathematics and honestly I am now equally amazed and disappointed in my old school. I am amazed that they managed to get kids to sort of understand math without these incredibly helpful materials, but I am also disappointed that they don’t use the materials that they use here. I ...

January 7, 2020 Day 1 Today was the first day of my personal J-Term that I planned for myself (See earlier blogs) and I immediately realized that this is going to be much more work than I had thought, but in a good way. You see, I forgot that the kids were, you know… children. And that children don’t understand things that you say as well as “full size” people which made things difficult. You see, some of them had slightly flawed “logic” and things that just seemed logical to me just didn’t didn’t make sense to them. Which surprised me because objective truths suddenly bec ame far less objective after they’d had a look at them. Children are have such amazing potential because they have the power to take in and retain so much information upon interacting with it just a single time. I was teaching them rounding today and many of them were able to get the right answer right away but couldn’t possibly begin to explain how to their confused classmates how/why 19 is closer to 20 tha...