My Personal Learning Path

I found a lesson plan that I thought would be great to use when teaching students about perimeter.  It was located on Education.com .  This was a lesson geared toward third grade students, and it aligns with the Common Core Standard 3.MD.D.8:  Solve real world and mathematical problems involving perimeters of polygons, including finding the perimeter given the side lengths, finding an unknown side length, and exhibiting rectangles with the same perimeter and different areas or with the same area and different perimeters. The lesson begins with an informational video about finding perimeter.  Following the video, the lesson plan explains a way to engage the students in a  brief conversation on the topic.  Afterward, you give them some examples and model how to find the perimeter.  Allow the students to choose things in the room for the examples (i.e. book, folder).  The part that I thought was fun was they used Cheez-It crackers to map the p...

After working through the Math Now for week 10, as well as some of the problems in problem set 2, I realized I needed more work with solving for a missing fraction. For instance, with the "Marlon Brando" problem, I did it completely differently then Dr. Dituri did, and after watching the video, I think the way he did it was much easier! I tried to figure out how many years were spent in each phase of life. So to find out how many years were spent as a child, I did 1/12 x 80 which came to 6.67 years. For youth: 2/7 x 80 equaled 22.86 years. Adult: 3/8 x 80 is 30 years. So, he spent 59.53 years of his life in the first three stages.  To find out how many years he spent as an old man, I subtracted 59.53 from 80 to get 20.47 years.  Then I asked, "20.47 is what percent of 80?"  That gave me 26% which I converted to a fraction of 13/50.  As it turns out, this is a different fraction than what Dr. Dituri got in his answer, so I took that to mean my way wasn...

When I was researching a game for the assignment, I came across several that I thought would be fun to implement in my future classroom.  I am going to post my main one to the week 10 discussion forum, but I wanted to share another one that I came across as my PLP for this week. Math Facts Race Combine math and physical activity in this fast-paced fact fluency drill. I liked this particular game because it can be adjusted to fit many different grade levels.  For instance, in the earlier elementary grades you can use it to practice addition facts, and in the mid-level grades you can have them practice multiplication facts.   Common Core Standards for addition: Grade 1: CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.6 – Add  and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10.  Use strategies such as counting on; making ten (e.g., 8 + 6 = 8 + 2 + 4 = 10 + 4 = 14); decomposing a number leading to a ten (e.g., 13 - 4 = 13 - ...

After my PLP last week, I feel like I have a better handle on using the chip model to add and subtract integers.  Now that I understand it better, I wanted to learn more about how to teach it to my students.  I felt that using a real-life example would help them to conceptualize the use of the chips more easily.   I found a video from The Teaching Channel that I thought was really helpful.  The video aligned with the Common Core state standards: MATH.7.NS.A.1C a nd MATH.7.NS.A.1D.  In it, the teacher uses the integer chips to represent hot and cold, and the students work on changing the temperature of soup.  The children decided that the red chips would represent “hot” or positive 1 and the yellow chips would be “cold” or negative 1.  After a brief group lesson, the teacher then has the children work in pairs to complete a worksheet.  She notes that pairs work better than larger groups because the children are more li...

For this week, I decided to move away from fractions and decimals.  I think I have a better handle on the topic after working on it for four weeks.   During our class last week, I was intrigued by the idea of using chip counters for adding and subtracting integers.   This was something I had never been exposed to, and I found it a little confusing.  I wanted to dig deeper into the topic so I could better understand the process.  I wanted to see more examples of how it is done, so I found a video at LearnZillion.com  that I found very helpful.  I was able to conceptualize the adding with counters, however, I found the subtraction confusing because of the addition of the zero pairs.  Now I understand that no matter how many zero pairs you add, you do not change the value of the original number.  And you need to add those zero pairs when you need to subtract and you do not have enough counters to do so once you lay out the original pr...

I wanted to continue to look at the relationship between fractions and decimals.  I found another great video at www.khanacademy.com .  Again, I like the idea of using the base 10 blocks to really give students a visual.  This video also shows how to use a number line to help students understand the process. I found a worksheet that I thought would be helpful and I completed it.  I almost forgot to simplify my fractions! I think that I have a better understanding of fractions and decimals after researching the topic over the past few weeks.  I now have more tools for explaining the subject to my future students, and I am thankful for all the other PLP's that touched upon the same subject!