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Current Meetings
Speaker: Kathy Horak Smith
Title: Problems Kids Care About
Description: In an effort to increase problem solving in the elementary classroom the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) created "Problem Solvers," a section of their journal, Teaching Children Mathematics, in which they posed one problem each month. It was an effort to actively engage children in real-world problem situations which had meaning for the students. In this same light, Dr. Smith routinely gives an assignment to her preservice teachers in which the preservice teachers ask their students to come up with questions that they [the students] want to solve. According to the NCTM Principles and Standards, students, even as low as Pre-K, should "pose questions and gather data about themselves and their surroundings" (NCTM, 2000, p. 108). The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate that there are other ways of teaching mathematics than following a script or textbook outline and to reinforce that, as a teacher, the textbook is only a resource. To meet the students' needs, one must reach beyond the textbook.
This session will show examples of some of the results from that assignment. In addition, the session will give participants a chance to investigate how to use Problems Kids Care About at all levels of mathematics, Kindergarten through high school.