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Week 6 Blog Post

For my one focus student, I used an example from a playground to illustrate a math concept.  Students were beginning a lesson on solving inequalities and equations, and the math concept that I wanted them to all grasp was always making sure to perform the same operation to both sides of the inequality/equality. Since all of the students in my class just went through elementary school and are familiar with various playground objects, I used an example of a see-saw to illustrate the concept of keeping two sides of an equation in balance.  I asked students to picture themselves sitting on a see-saw with a smaller cousin/sibling/etc. on the other side.  This would imply that the student was on the ground, and the smaller cousin/sibling/etc. was in the air.  I then asked what would happen if they were both wearing 5 pound backpacks, and removed the backpacks at the same time. This was to illustrate that as long as we added or removed the exact same amount of weight from each side of the

Disciplinary Literacy in Mathematics

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Disciplinary literacy in math relates to the why, the when, and the how of mathematics. Students need to understand why  algorithms work, for example.  Why do we borrow when doing subtraction?  Why does cross multiplication work?  Why does long division work?  Developing conceptual understanding of these methods is important because it builds students' problem solving skills, and their abilities to solve problems in areas where an algorithm isn't known. Knowing when  to use a particular method for solving a problem is also important - if students properly apply problem solving techniques to situations where those techniques are critical, they have far more opportunity to experience success than a student who cannot apply conceptual understanding or appropriate algorithms to a problem. Finally, knowing how  to apply the right problem solving technique is necessary to arrive at the correct solution.  Here are three examples of skills related to math literacy: Problem Solv