Maths

We started MATHS this week in classes. We had 4 days of MATHS for the whole semester, which I am supper happy about, but I am going to miss it, which is so weird because I usually don’t love math. Our teacher, Helen Walters is just amazing though. She helped me see math in a whole new light. I love how they teach math in small groups rather than always as a whole class. It is such a great way to help the students understand math and its underlying principles instead of parroting the teacher and not learning. She taught us a heaps of math games in the classroom that I am going to use when I teach including a rocket game to teach order, a card game to teach what comes next and before, a warm up game of I have who has, tens and one with popsicle sticks, place value with money, ect. It is such a great way to teach and really helps even students that struggle to understand math. My favorite maths activities though were creating a garden by measuring parts of our body and making a tapa. They were rich activities and not only taught math but the other subjects as well. We made the garden by working in groups and measuring different body parts and then using those measurements to make the different flowers, trees, etc. It was way fun.

 Then for the tapa we gridded out some paper and drew patterns, dyed our paper and the bleached parts of the art. It was so fun to plot out our own pattern and create cool Maori art that involved so much underlying math. It took most of the day, but they look so cool and were really fun.

 On the last day of maths we played a bunch of math games that would be great for kids and then did a statistical analysis with pebbles/ m&ms. We made a pictograph with the candies, a bar graph, a strip graph, and a pie graph. A great fun way to teach kids about graphs, comparisons, and percentages and it was fun.

We also made New Zealand costumes out of newspaper and had a fashion show which doesn't relate much to maths but it was fun. We had some traditional Maori and Pacifica costumes and a rugby player. So fun.

Kids would love to learn through doing these activities.  It is one of the most effective and applicable classes I have taken for elementary education.