Experiences

Mathematics and other beasts - using pictures during the process of math studies

Māra Bērente

Latvia

Vocational School

Maths

Teaching in class

Direct

Math is a subject which requires to remember many concepts. A part of them corresponds to Latvian comprehension , but a part is foreign words. I use comparisons in oral or visual form for students to comprehend the mathematical structures better. Any teacher has his own or a borrowed story about a denominator and a numerator ( Peter is counting his classmates who have fallen in the ditch ). The most difficult thing is operations with different symbols , the teacher is always reminding about bills which can be paid pay or cannot be paid. My offer is to practice the wrong reading ( -three and +five , minus and plus make a pair and go to a cafe while the remaining ones study maths.) There are situations which require improvisation .For example, when the students cannot remember the shortest way to calculate the square root , I draw elephants.


One of the groups even have a name for solving equations with a substitution method -elephant task- because I draw elephants when some part repeats itself to accentuate it. Provision of IT gave an opportunity to use slides during the process of math studies. There I saw an opportunity to use pictures and moving pictures to illustrate mathematical concepts.
For most cases slides are prepared beforehand to accentuate something or to draw attention to something. But there are situations when they are being made during the lesson. For example, the definition of a logarithm which I had to repeat several times before I used moving pictures instead.
It looks like this (without movements , of course).
Such materials were used during my lessons from time to time as there is no legal support for such materials and anybody who is listening can make a remark about unscientific language. But it refreshes students' knowledge and gives emotional colouring which is needed to remember the material better.
I also encourage students to make up their own stories for some mathematical concepts.
Some of my offers can be seen in the portal matuncz.wordpress.lv