Thursday, July 21, 2011

Math Journals

Today I've spent some time reading a variety of articles about math journals. While I'm really comfortable with science notebooks, math journals are a different story. I'm working my way through them. I have used a problem solving notebooks, but I'm not fully satisfied with that format. So, in my live binder on science notebooks, I've added a few more articles on math journals. I guess tomorrow I will try to lay out what I'd like to see when my students write about math.

If you have been using math journals or notebooks; whatever you call them, share your ideas. This is an area I need to really improve on in my daily math instruction. I'm also reading Class Discussions, Using Math Talk to help Students Learn by Chapin, O'Connor, and Anderson. Gene Williams (a MEMTA instructor) lent this to me in New Orleans and rereading Sherry Parrish's (another MEMTA instructor) book Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computational Strategies, Grades k-5. The reason why I'm mentioning these books in an post about writing in math, it's similar to writing in science, students have to be able to talk and discuss to clarify their ideas before writing down their thinking in math.

Not ditching the science notebooks, I think that I've go those settled to start the school year when I can get student samples posted. I do have a series of questions we used with the elective MEMTA notebook session that I will be posting on for the next week or so. until then, please share any math journaling ideas!

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