Last semester, I completed my student-teaching experience at Bainbridge Elementary School, in Elizabethtown Area School District (Elizabethtown, PA). I spent half of my semester in 4th grade and the second half in Learning Support for 3rd-5th grade. Both of these experiences were priceless for me, providing me with many learning experiences that simply can't be learned inside a college classroom. During my time there however, I encountered many students that struggled significantly with mathematics word problem solving. It was very challenging for them to solve these problems for numerous reasons, and I have decided to devote my time looking at the struggles these students have and various ways teachers can help them overcome them.
I have been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to continue working with the students from my student teaching experience in an after-school math tutoring program. Hopefully, I will be able to test out some of strategies from my research to see first-hand if they can help children succeed. Growing up, mathematics was always my favorite subject. I love working with numbers to try and solve problems. I am still intrigued by the mathematics problems faced in everyday life, and want students to be able to solve these problems successfully-- and enjoy doing so.
In my preliminary research, I have found many sources supporting the use of literature in mathematics. When I thought about this, it makes complete sense. Not only is it good practice to connect subjects across the curriculum, but the major problem that I have encountered in working with children solving word problems is that they don't comprehend what the problem is asking. If problems are presented in a story form, students have picture clues to aid with comprehension. They also are more prone to incorporate all of their strategies they use in reading comprehension to understand the problem. It makes sense!
As a pre-service teacher however, I am just beginning to explore the use of literature in mathematics. Therefore, I have decided to keep a blog and post after each book I read to reflect upon and share the possible uses in the field of mathematics. Hopefully, throughout the course of the next few months, I will establish a good basis of various books across a wide range of topics in mathematics!
This is a very important and interesting topic. Incorporating this into the classroom is benefical for all students. At my placement, this is something they are trying to add to the curriculm and was mentioned frequently.
ReplyDeleteThat's great! Where is your placement? I'm intrigued!
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