17 October 2011

PEMDAS

I was asked to teach a lesson in a 4th grade class at the last minute.  I had my Ipad in hand and thought what if the students made a song about the order of operations.  I downloaded two songs to use as examples and then gave them 20 minutes to create a song. Here is one of the ideas I recorded.
I am finding some great things about the world of math.  I am learning that we need to spend more time dedicated to helping the students understand what they are trying to find and how to share the answer.  Many students just want to get a number answer from the problem, I think this is because they are hardly given real problems they are only given problems with numbers.  When was the last time I had to solve a problem in my life where it was just numbers and then what did I do with this answer.  Should I have math teachers create one or more real problems per concept or is just understanding how to solve the problem good enough?