Gratitude for Teachers: Goals of Teaching Elementary Math
Giving teachers a heads up Thank You is something that happens usually once or twice a year – maybe Valentine’s Day, Christmas time…we often wonder if parents and kids truly realize the giving that teachers do in their daily classroom lives – so we want to say Thank You!
Making the task of teaching elementary math a little easier on the shoulders of the teachers, here is a checklist of goals for the year, to check off through the year, and give yourself a pat on the back for all of your teaching efforts and successes. Given all that teachers do in the run of a teaching day, month, term and year, saying thank you is the least any of us can do.
At the year’s end, you can ask yourself if your Learners are Able to:
- Feel good about themselves whether they have the answers correctly or incorrectly divide by multiples of 10, 100, and 1000
- Understand and make basic home economic money-wise decisions such as buying groceries
- Grasp fractions, whole numbers, proportions, and percentiles
- Make a graph, understand a graph
- Use deductive reasoning – such as assessing shapes and figures in geometry and how they relate to each other
- Add, subtract, and multiply fractions
Adding, subtracting, and multiplying fractions all connect with a broader goal of understanding parts or part and whole of all life ideas and circumstances. The mind develops conceptual ratios, proportions, and percentiles, as we walk through a market or a neighborhood. These become the building blocks of learning algebra and calculus in the later years – conceptual models developing in the mind of building a bridge, for example.
Books and curriculum are tools to achieve these goals for teaching and learning in the elementary classroom, but the process of achieving or attempting to achieve the goals is the real success for both the learners and the Teachers.
For some fun, using games to teach and learn math, here are a few ideas: