Blog Post #5

 

Welcome to Blog #5!

Week 9 placed a focus on the data strand of mathematics. Although I took higher education in this content, it is not my favourite, so I was very interested in how to approach it from a different perspective than the usual ‘what is the probability that Emily draws a red marble?’. We talked about this in class, but a lot of us went through the same process where data and probability had us answer questions based on the likelihood of events happening or surveying our peers about their favourite ice cream flavour (Susin, week 9). There was not much differentiation about this strand among most of us students in the class. I found it interesting reading the textbook on this subject and taking a look at the new curriculum expectations to better understand what I would be teaching instead. I took a look at the lesson plan provided by the textbook (Small, 2020) and saw that there was an emphasis on making students aware of terms such as mean and median, words that I remember being drilled in me as well. 

What I really liked about week 10’s lesson was that we answered the question “what is the point of comparing curriculum content from the previous curriculum (2005) to the new math one (2020)?” (Susin, week 10). For example, we talked about how the 2005 curriculum only focused on integers in gr 7-8 whereas we now focus on this as early as 6th grade. Considering there could be grade 8 students that have yet to learn about integers, it is important to understand the changes that have been made to the curriculum so that we know how to plan for student learning. One of the first concerns my AT brought up to me from my first observational day was that a lot of her students are behind in many curriculum expectations because of the pandemic and online learning, therefore I think it is even more important to acknowledge any learning gaps there might be. 

Works Cited

Ministry of Education. (2005). The Ontario Curriculum grades 1-8: Mathematics. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/curricul/elementary/math1-8e.pdf 

Ministry of Education. (2020). The Ontario Curriculum grades 1-8: Mathematics. https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/elementary-mathematics 

Small, M. (2020). 4th Edition. Making Math Meaningful to Canadian Students, K-8. 3rd Edition, Toronto, Nelson. 

Susin, C. (week 10, 2021). Strand B: Integers and Exponents [PowerPoint]. Retrieved From Sakai 

Susin, C. (week 9, 2021). Strand D: Data Literacy &Probability [PowerPoint]. Retrieved From Sakai