Math Talk: Another way to encourage it!

I am always looking for new ways to engage students in math talk.  Math talk is such a powerful tool for building student understanding!

A website I recently found offers some great discussion starters that could be used in a variety of ways in your classroom.  Same but Different Math offers your students images to compare and contrast. These images are categorized to improve your search for what you need.

Let me know what you think about this site or if you would like my help in implementing its images in your classroom!

Goal for 2018: Modeling a Growth Mindset in Math

Jo Boaler is an educator at Stanford who has done much research and writing about math education.  She has worked closely with Carol Dweck to provide us with books, videos, activities and resources to help us encourage a growth mindset for our students. If you are looking for some professional reading, I would recommend looking at some of her books.

Her website is youcubed.org.  I use it a lot when searching for rich problem-solving activities.  When speaking about growth in math, she stresses the importance of visualization.  From her site, you can download some posters that show students the value of training our brains as mathematicians.  

 


If you are interested in books to use during your workshop that encourage growth mindset, you might be able to find one here or here.

Do you have any tools that you use to build growth mindset?  Share in the comments below!

Math Maven's Mysteries

It always amazes me the free things that I find out there on the internet...

Link to Scholastic's Math Maven's index page

This site from Scholastic offers interactive math mysteries of all levels and on a variety of math topics.  They would be great to use as a small group activity or a problem-solving station during workshop.  It offers many great resources.  Many of the problems are ready for the SMARTBoard, there is the opportunity for the story problem to be read to the students, the teacher's resource has many supplemental activities, and you can print out paper copies for students as well!  The main page provides links to all of these options.  I hope you can find something that will fit your classroom!