Be the Teacher

One thing I try to instill in my students is that many times, they learn better from each other than from me. I find that this is easily displayed when teaching math. I love teaching math. It's my favorite subject to teach and if I could teach my students math all day, I would! As the year progressed, I saw my students grow and mature enough to be able to teach the entire class. I started by giving them a word problem.

While I had the problem on the board, I had printed it for the students to glue into their notebooks. This was the best thing I did this year (and obviously, I don't have a picture!)! It helped so much because students weren't spending time copying down the problem and perhaps not writing it correctly. They were able to highlight/cross out things as we went through our five step problem solving method. I am definitely continuing this next year!

I would show the problem on the board, give students time to glue it in, and start working on it, and then pick a stick to have a student come up to the board and be the teacher. This took lots of practice and modeling because the students just wanted to come up and solve the problem. I didn't let them do that. They had to step by step either explain and/or ask their classmates what to do. It was definitely a learning curve, but they truly enjoyed it and the students loved being able to help each other.

Leave a Comment 4th Grade, Math