Week 5 Mathematics

          From this weeks online class, the main message I got from the video I watched was that math is a subject with only a few general principles that are important to understand. Math is a subject where the most important thing is learning the big ideas but, many students think its about memorizing all the different equations. Now throughout high school I definitely thought math was purely memorization. I would memorize equations, steps on how to answer certain questions, and what equations usually went together to solve a question. Looking back, I think there would have been a lot less pressure if I was told to think more about the main idea to try to understand the problem better. At the time it was just easy to memorize things and hope they stuck with you until the test was over, and then I carried on to survive yet another unit in math and memorize more equations. HOWEVER, the most important thing to learning is knowing that if you memorize something it means you truly don't understand it. Memorization stays for a certain amount of time and then the knowledge is lost, however, taking the time to understand something allows students to process it through their mind in a way that helps them remember it. Different strategies students may use are through a song, an abbreviation, a story, whatever it may be, you will remember it! Im hoping as a future educator that I can help my students see the big picture and help them understand things so they don't have to force themselves to use memorization to get by.

                     via GIPHY

         This week I also completed my webinar discussing Financial Literacy. I was very nervous before our webinar started because I had never done a webinar before and it made me even more nervous thinking that there was going to be an error going live. Thankfully, it all worked out and the whole thing ran smoothly. Our target group was grade 4 students focusing on learning how to save and budget their money through real life scenarios.I enjoyed being able to see our participants during the webinar as it allowed everyone to interact together and students were able to learn in the comfort of their own home. I think our evaluators really enjoyed our main activity that challenged them to look through the food basics flyer to create a dinner for themselves with only $20.00.  This allowed them  to use addition to see the total amount of the food supplies they picked and allowed them to be creative in their own meal that they could then share with the rest of us online. We choose the food basics flyer because it shows students the deals they can get in the grocery store to help them get into the habit of trying to spend when things are on sale to save overall. This lesson could then be expanded to talk about and teach students how to calculate HST.  Students can then redo this activity and see if they need to modify their meals to include HST. This also can be connected to the physical education curriculum by seeing and trying to get students to create meals using different food groups to make sure they provide enough nutrition in their meals. Overall, I was very happy with how our webinar went and the participation of our classmates to make it successful.

Below is our activity:

Grocery store challenge!

SCENARIO

• You have arrived to the grocery store to create a dinner for yourself, however you only have $20.00 in your wallet. 
• Using the Food Basics Flyer, what items will you buy to make your dinner tonight? Remember you only have $20.00.
• Flyer: https://www.foodbasics.ca/flyer.en.html

Strkalj, N. (2017). Webinar Action Shot. (Personal Photo)
Retrieved from Personal Library.

Lastly, a helpful resource that I found interesting to look at was: http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesFL/Resources/Elementary/FinLitGr4to8.pdf