Math Activities

           Teaching math is not that easy. Many children and even adults shy away from math because of the notion that it is difficult. As a child, math had been one of my favorite subjects as it didn’t require much memorization, rather understanding of concepts and applying them to different situations. But as I grew older, my relationship with math became less peachy.

           Now, as a future teacher, it would be one of our responsibilities to present math as a fun and not scary subject. The good news is, math is one of the easiest subjects to use games and play as it fits well with relays and other competitive games. You could use just about almost anything when teaching math. From toys, food, things around the house and even those that you see on the streets. There are also a lot of story books that include math concepts. Math is everywhere and it is to our advantage as teachers as we will never run out of things to use in our math activities.

           But despite the seeming abundance of materials, surprisingly we found it hard to find a nice math activity to do when we needed two.  To be really honest, this was the most frustrating peer teaching for me. I found it hard to grasp why there were so many things to do but we couldn’t settle on one.

           I already prepared a list of proposed activities. All of which had pretty simple materials that we could procure in the three hour break that I have right before the class. One of which was a simple color and pattern matching game where they would just copy how the candies were arranged in a sheet that we just need to have to print. But since we couldn’t find the candies we wanted, we had to choose from the others. Another would be a length or size comparison game that we didn’t push through  with.

           We decided to go with the musical shapes that I already planned out beforehand. I had to figure out how many shapes, of what color they should be, and what order are we going to call them out so that the participants would decrease one by one until just one winner is left. We just had to buy colored cartolina to cut out in the right shapes and number. Now for the other activity, I was about out of frustration because it was only an hour  before class time and no one was giving ideas for it. I was so drained and irritated because it seemed that I was doing it on my own even if my groupmates were physically with me. We were standing there at the store, trying to come up with ideas, begging them to think with me but in the end I still had to pull out an activity out of thin air on my own. This is how Hugo the shape monster was born.

           Contrary to what our other classmates thought, everything about the activity (the name, the planet, the mechanics) were made up as I went. I had to cut the mouth of Hugo from a Zest-O box while riding a jeepney because it was thirty minutes before class. While my groupmates were cutting out the shapes for our activity, I was making a green monster box, trying not to just shriek like a little kid out of pressure and frustration. I took Hugo on my commute home that afternoon and threw him in a trash can in Araneta. I didn’t want to bring home a reminder of bad vibes. Anyway, if I needed another Hugo, I could device one in a span of thirty minutes, given that I'm pressured enough.

           Lesson of the day? There were more than one.

           One. A thirty minute lesson plan is possible, but not advisable. You should be sure of what you want and how you want it at least a night before you do the activity. Otherwise you would feel unprepared and it would most probably break your day.

           Two. No matter what happens, be confident. They wouldn’t know you just pulled this together in the past half hour if you wouldn’t show it. As they say, the show must go on. In this case, the class must go on. You should still act like you are having fun when all you want to do is to throw the green shape monster against the wall and scream at it for ruining your life. Sort of.

           Finally. Three. Patience. I know I already ranted about this to Teacher Yvette and to my other friends. Some of them advised me to leave the group if I could do it on my own before it ruins my final demo but I didn’t. My groupmates are actually nice people. It's just that it does get really frustrating at times how they can be so passive when I am already asking them, begging them, for ideas. But I had to be patient. We still had the apprenticeship, lesson plan and actual demo to go through.

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