Juegos (games)

During my last trip here, I relied on students copying and completing a lot of work from the big white board. I would spend maybe 4-5 minutes introducing a topic, and the rest of the time I would circulate around the classroom, working with individual students (mostly repeating the instructions I said at the beginning). This type of teaching is not very exciting (for the teacher or student). Due to my limited Spanish, I felt that this was my only choice. Since my Spanish has improved significantly, I've tried to create activities that are more interactive. Today was one of those days. I explained things and asked questions, gauged their responses and calibrated my instruction accordingly. It felt like I was actually teaching.

I think this means that I'm able to be more like the teacher I am in my native language. Because I can speak the language with much more confidence, I am also able to project more of my personality, which is important in teaching (if your personality is appealing to children).

One of the activities that I emphasize in my Math Pedagogy course is the importance of math games in math instruction. I teach my students how to use a simple deck of cards and teach their students how to play games that have mathematical significance. Today I introduced a new math game. It was simple, really. You have two teams and one student volunteer. The student volunteer holds and shuffles all the cards (with the face cards taken out). Two students come up to the front of the class, the student volunteer shows them a card. The students must either say "prime" or "composite" and they only get one guess. The first student to answer correctly gets a point for their team. The kids loved it, and they really started to at least recognize which numbers were prime and which were composite.

This activity, of course, was a practice activity that came after we had explored prime and composite numbers from a conceptual/foundational level. Last week the students explored the factors between 1-20, in visual and factoral form (see post below). Today, I had them search for prime numbers in their list of factors that they worked on last week. We talked about patterns we noticed in the factors between 1-20 (Which number has the most factors? Which composite number has the least? etc.).

After our game, we had recess (la pausa) and then started language arts. After students finish their language arts work, many of them ask to read. Today, a few students asked for the playing cards, so that they could play the prime & composite game. I was surprised by this request, for some reason. I guess I'm not always confident that they really enjoy everything I give them, like "they're only doing this to humor me"--which is NOT something I think about in my teaching back home. This only strengthened my belief in simplistic beauty of math games. These kids really loved it, and the ones that played it, deepened their knowledge of prime and composite number facts (at least to 10!). I'll take that as a victory.