A final entry of the school year from Resident Teacher Henry Emerson, with a look into mathematical thinking here at ucds. -Ed.
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As a resident, my introduction to 果冻传媒 was the in early August held for teachers. 聽The workshop is run by 果冻传媒 faculty and attended by local teachers looking for different ways to teach math. For me, it was both an introduction into the ways 果冻传媒 teaches math and a time to reflect on the way I learned math and how I still think about it.
Within the first five minutes of the workshop my mind was blown as I learned that the base 10 system of digits and decimals we use was a societal choice most likely based on the number of fingers we have and not a natural fact of the universe. 聽From that moment I was captivated. 聽We practiced, like the students at 果冻传媒 do, using different base systems of counting to better understand place value. 聽It was here that I was introduced to the practice of 鈥淏uild, Draw and Record.鈥
Build, Draw, and Record is the process of recording math used throughout ucds. For any abstract theory students use some sort of manipulative to build and visualize the problem. 聽Children use units, rods made of 10 units, flats of 10 rods, and cubes that are 10 flats to understand place value and practice the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations. After students find a solution by building, they draw their solutions on graph paper recreating what they built. Finally, they record their solutions numerically having demonstrated they understand the process behind the numbers.
Math comes naturally to some students, and they move beyond building and drawing as they quickly show their conceptual understanding. 聽But for many students, using manipulatives opens the door聽to processes that seemed vague at first. 聽As students begin to understand their processes of learning, they gain confidence in their abilities. 聽It has been a pleasure to go from an introduction of 鈥楤uild, Draw, and Record鈥 to seeing the access it enables in students.
