Week 4

This week I looked up the disadvantages of having a pet in the home with children. I could not find many resources to back up this statement. I suppose not many people think that pets are a bad thing to have. So far I have more advantages of pets rather than disadvantages. Some of the things that I found involve the maintenance and commitment of having a pet. The main disadvantage is that pets can be very expensive, especially if they get sick. It costs a lot of money to not only buy a pet (if you buy an expensive purebred dog for example), but to continue to care for a pet. It takes a lot of time and energy to care for a pet. They require feeding and exercise and if you do not fully commit to caring for a pet, then maybe you should not own one. 

I did not quite find the information that I was hoping for. I was hoping that I might find some information about the developmental benefits of not owning a pet (in contrast to the benefits of owning a pet). Perhaps I need to look for more specific resources to find this information, or maybe no one has researched this theory. From most of the information I have looked at, pets are generally beneficial to people.

Next week I will compare and contrast the information I have gathered and I will hopefully come to a conclusion about pets. I will also try and discover which pet is best to have in regards to the development process.

Week 3

This week we watched another great TED talk about how students can learn on their own if you give them the materials they need. I think this relates to our Genius hour projects because we are figuring out these projects on our own. We came up with these ideas ourselves and we are working on them on our own. So far, I've been looking up how pets can be beneficial to a child. There have been so many great things that I've found so far. Some things I already knew, but other benefits were quite surprising to me. 

The most obvious benefits were companionship, entertainment, and physical. Pets provide a friendship for children, especially for less outgoing kids. They can also be social facilitators by allowing shy kids to approach other children if there is a pet present. Pets are definitely entertaining, especially for children. They can stay occupied by a pet (even something simple like a fish swimming around) for a long time. They can even get exercise with a dog by taking it for walks, playing fetch, or just running around in the yard. 

I discovered a few benefits that I did not expect to come from having a pet, but I was pleased that they exist. Pets can help with the cognitive development of children, if they want to learn more about their pet, whether from the veterinarian or their own research, it sparks a desire for learning. Pets can also be good health benefits to children. A pediatrician, Dennis Ownby found that kids who were exposed to 2 or more dogs or cats as babies were less likely to develop common allergies such as pet, dust-mite, ragweed, and grass allergies. Early exposure to pets may also decrease a child’s risk of developing asthma and help with other respiratory problems. 

Watch my Genius Hour trailer that will introduce what my own Genius Hour project will be about!

I'm very pleased with my progress so far, and I hope to learn more as I continue my research. Next week I will be looking up what are benefits of not having a pet, or the disadvantages of having a pet while growing up. I'm very interested to see what information I can find as I keeping digging.

Week 3 Reflection

In class we had people instruct on Whole Numbers. We read chapter 10 of the textbook, which was also describing Whole Numbers. My classmates reviewed different strategies to teach addition, estimation, and place values. 

One of the methods I found very helpful was grouping numbers together and rounding in order to add large numbers. I found this very helpful to add large numbers like 345+138. We added the hundreds together first to get 400, then the tens to get 70, and the ones to get 13, to find a total of 483. I think this is a good strategy because students get intimidated by large numbers and this really helps to simplify things for them. 

Woolley, E. © 2015

These place value riddles were quite informative and actually fun to do. They challenged me to think and I was really pleased with myself when I was able to figure out the answer. I think this was a good activity and I would definitely use this in my own class to confirm that students know place values.

Woolley, E. © 2015

This image shows how numbers can be grouped together. This really caught my attention and really opened my eyes to how numbers come together. I highlighted some of the patterns that I noticed in particular. The pink indicates groups of 5, the blue represents groups of 4. There are many other patterns to this image, like the circles representing prime numbers. I will definitely use this in my class room to help students visual numbers and their patterns, and not just as a number. These groupings will definitely help with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. This is a really good strategy that I hope to teach in my class one day. 

Week 2 Reflection

After the second session of my Mathematics class, I still have mixed feelings about math. I’ve never been particularly fond of math. I was pretty good at it in elementary school and I thought I was good at it, but by the time I was in grade 9 math, I realized I was not very good at math. I was always really lost and confused in my math classes in high school. After grade 11 I thought I was done with math classes. When I was registering for classes at Brock Education, and I saw that one of my mandatory classes was a math, I was really worried. I’m still a little confused in this class, but I’m hoping that by the end of this course I will be able to understand math much better, so that I will be able to instruct my students.

I think that being a good math student means finding different ways to solve problems, rather than just one solution. The same thing with being a good math teacher, you should use different methods to teach students how to problem solve. As a good math teacher you should let students find ways to solve problems, instead of just giving them a formula for them to plug in the information to find the answer. We did something similar in the second session of our math class. Our prof asked us to find the answer to the question “how many handshakes will 30 people make if they all shake each other’s hands?” He didn’t give us a formula, he just asked us to solve the problem. Different students used different methods, using blocks, using different calculations.

Woolley, E. © 2015

 My group modelled the problem by getting the 6 of us to shake each other’s hands. We found that if there are 6 people, then there will be 5 handshakes. From this, we were able to calculate how many handshakes 30 people will make.

Woolley, E. © 2015

One of the optional articles we were given to read for this session led to me finding this article, which really peaked my interest. It talked about how math is poorly represented in tv and movies. This is probably one of the reasons that kids don't like math. It is either shown in a negative way and so the kids view it as a bad thing, or it viewed as hard problems, but is actually fairly simple  (like on Numb3rs), so that kids think that math is not difficult but then they can't figure it out in class. I think one thing teachers should teach in the classroom, is that math is not a bad thing, and it really is used in everyday life. 

My Genius Hour Question

We looked up a bunch of ideas for Genius Hour in class today. After doing a bit of brainstorming with my classmates I decided to ask the question "how can students benefit from having a classroom pet (like a goldfish)?". I was very curious about if having a pet in the classroom could help teach students more about life and responsibilities. I started creating my proposal pitch about this question where I decided to tweak my question to: "how can kids benefit from having a pet?". I didn't want to limit my research to just a few students sharing a pet as a project in the classroom. I want to know if it's more beneficial for kids to grow up with a pet in their home or if its better for someone to grow up without a pet.

 Right now my thinking is that it is better for a kid to have some sort of companionship (especially only children), and to have responsibilities like taking care of a living creature. I would like to find out if there has been actual research done on this topic and to see what has already been found out. I hope to do a bit of my own research by interviewing kids who have pets, kids without, and the parents of each group to see what their opinions are. Personally, I had pets growing up and I found it extremely beneficial to my upbringing. I had fish, frogs, toads, and birds in my childhood home. I found that I became more responsible for something other than myself at an earlier age. Having pets also helped my parents explain the concept of life and death, which can be a very hard issue to explain to children. I'd like to see what other people's experiences are with pets, and what it's like to have other types of pets (dogs, cats, etc.). I'd also like to know how people who didn't grow up with a pet feel about their upbringing and if they feel like they missed out by not having a pet.

Introduction

Hey all,
My name is Ellena and I'm 22 years old. I graduated this year from the University of Waterloo with a major in French, and a double minor in Applied Language Studies and Religious Studies. I've always wanted to become a teacher ever since I was a little kid. I hope to become a French teacher, teaching Core French in an elementary school in the near future. My grandfather, my aunt, and my uncle are all teachers, so I guess teaching runs in the family. I hope to make it through these next two
years without too much difficulty with the coursework. I'm particularly worried about this Math course, because I've never been too good at math work. Even simple math like addition and subtraction takes me a while to figure out without a calculator, so I'm hoping that this course will help to improve my own math skills, but also help me instruct students how to overcome their struggles with math problems.

I'll introduce myself a little more. I like to hangout with my friends and my boyfriend on my free time. If I'm not with them, then I'm most likely lounging around my room watch Netflix. I like to cook and bake, but I often find that I'm too busy to be in the kitchen, so I hope to find more time to get back into cooking. I'm very active on many social medias; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are my main outlets to connect with friends. I'm obsessed with check my newsfeeds to find out what my friends and the rest of the world are up to. I'm not too sure what else would be relevant to let you guys know, so I guess for now I'll leave it at that, and hopefully I'll share more as the course goes on. Thanks for reading, I'll leave you with a selfie from my last Instagram post. Enjoy!

Woolley, E. © 2015

Copyright for Teachers

We just learned about copyright and the importance of learning about it in the classroom. Previously, I knew that copyrighting was a way to protect someone’s work by law Now I know that copy rights protects an artist’s creativity against uses that they don’t consent to. We also learned about Creative Commons, which is used to define the terms of the copyright if an artist decides that they want to share their work and can allow others to use it and alter it if they want. The most important thing that teachers should teach students about copyright is that they cannot just use media (songs, videos, photos, etc.) that they find on the Internet if they do not have permission. I think that a lot of people (teachers included) just find resources on the Internet and do not have permission to use these sources and do not give proper credit to the artists. If teachers should students how to properly cite the media that they find online, then more artists will be supported. This way when/if students post their own work online, they can know how to use Creative Commons and get credited for their work. 

I found two images online, one using Flickr and the second from Google. 

San José Library. (2009, August 29). Three girls using the computer at the grand opening [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjoselibrary/3887312861/

Huxley10. (2008, October 17). A photo of the WHC library floor [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Library_floor.jpg