Curriculum Resources

Last week during math class, we were given the opportunity to browse the various resources that are available to teachers for each grade level. Although I have seen a number of these resources already, I was surprised by others. 

Before this class, I didn't realize the amount of stories that were available for teaching math in the primary grades. I have seen a few "Big Books" that were based on basic concepts such as "big and small" during my observation days, but I wasn't aware that there were many of them for different grade levels. I  also wasn't aware that the smaller individual books even existed. I really like the idea of sending home math-related books as baggy books to students to further enforce certain topics because I think it would be very beneficial to some students. Some children may understand a concept better if they read about it in a story than if they were simply receiving instructions from the teacher. 

One thing that surprised me is that these fun storybooks pretty much disappeared by grade four, leaving not much more than the math textbook and a few teaching guides as resources. In fact, as mentioned in class, a lot of the fun and appealing resources seen in the primary grades pretty much disappear before elementary. The elementary textbooks seemed to get increasingly duller (literally!) and to me, sends out the message that math is a boring subject and that it is less appealing than the other subject areas. 

In saying this, it is comforting for us, as future teachers, to know that there are many great math-related storybooks that can be incorporated into elementary classrooms and that we are not limited to using the textbook. In our children's literature course, our last blog post was on a book that had either a math- or science-related theme. After seeing the available resources for elementary grades, I plan to keep a list of the various books that were discussed in our blogs to use in the future. Although the textbook is very valuable, it is very important that we don't send the message that "math is boring" to our students. Therefore, I believe we should try and incorporate as many additional resources as possible to address the interests of our students and keep them interested in learning math!

- Cheryl