Math Classroom Reflection - Amy Tenbrink

I didn’t go to my placement classroom this week because of spring break starting on Friday. Instead I decided to reflect on the way my mentor teacher teaches math in my classroom. My students are kindergarten and first graders, so teaching math can be rather difficult at times. It can still be done though. In my math lesson completed earlier in the last couple weeks, I proved that teaching these kids complex math concepts can go very well. My math lesson was complicated and the kindergarteners took to it very well. My teacher either doesn’t know this or doesn’t care to create complex math plans for the students. Each day the students do math stations for about half an hour. There are four stations, but they are the same stations every day. The students rotate from station to station during the half hour time period, but the thing that bugs me is that the stations never change. The students have so much potential in math and aren’t able to use any of it. The stations themselves are not challenging at all. They are simple minded and most of the children have memorized them. There is one station on the computer, which 4 students can use at a time. The students love this station, because they just click through games. There is no goal to this, and when the game is over it just resets and the students do the same one over again. The next station is puzzles, and it more challenges the students in their logical thinking than in their math thinking. The station with the counting blocks is the same task over and over again, and the shape picture task is so self-explanatory the kids can do it with their eyes closed. Overall the students are not learning anything besides memorization skills from these stations. I feel that their potential is ultimately being wasted.

I feel that if I was these students teacher, I would put more mathematics into each task. It would easy to find better computer games for the kids that actually challenge their brains. The puzzle task could incorporate addition and subtraction as mentioned in another one of my blogs. The block counting task could incorporate multiplication very simply. There are so many things that could be done. I’m not going to be able to change my mentor teacher’s teaching style, but I can certainly shape my own to make my students better math students.