February Journal #1

The article "Story Boards for Meaningful Patterns" from Teaching Children Mathematics was about using story boards to get students to recognize patterns. The article states how important it is that students learn patterns, functions, and relations from the time they start prekindergarten to senior year of high school. The authors give different types of patterns and examples of how to use the patterns in this article. The teacher says that rhythmic patterns can be used simply to get students attention and spelling patterns are used when teaching writing. The teachers used snap cubes when teaching her lesson and let the students use their own snap cubes when building their own patterns and placing them on the storyboards. The students would use the storyboards for the different patterns and then create it with the cubes and have to present them to the class. When the students were talking through their patterns and stories that they created some of the students would catch the mistakes that they made and fix them. The article explained how the teacher should be modeling storyboards. It showed what the teacher was doing wrong and how she could fix that so her students could better understand the patterns.

An interesting part of this article was how the college professor came in and helped this teacher to make her lesson plans better. When she first taught the lesson a lot of the students were not understanding the patterns that she was teaching. The observation teacher said that if the students attach meaning to the patterns by having to explain it orally that the students might understand more which I thought was interesting. The teacher came back to observe at a later date and the students made a connection that she was the "pattern lady" and showed her the new patterns that they made. This article reminded me a lot of the process standards because the teacher was incorporating communication, connections, problem solving and reasoning and proof. I also realized how important self evaluation is to teaching a lesson and that teachers need to be doing this frequently.

Dubon, L.P. & Shafer, K.G. (2010). Storyboards for meaningful patterns. Teaching Children Mathematics. pp 325-329.