Making Math More Visual

 On Saturday morning, I got up bright and early (before seven) to attend a webinar on taking problems from the textbook and adjusting them to make them more interesting.  In other words, how to spark curiosity so students want to do math.

The basic idea is to remove as much actual written information as possible and replace it with visuals.  This way students are given the chance to hypothesis, test, revise, and estimate until they arrive at their final answer.

You might start by showing three squares on the screen and ask students what do they think comes next.  After they have a chance to speculate, show the next one which shows six squares in two rows. Ask them to make suggestions about what is next.  Do this for two more times, then ask them to provide a possible mathematical rule.

Now, I know that many of us have trouble figuring out how to represent something visually.  I am too literal so if the problem was about gallons of milk, I'd use gallons rather than thinking of squares and rectangles to represent the same system.  Thus there is a website that can help us get started.  It is called Math is Visual.

The site has videos designed to be used by the teacher a step at time.  It sets up the situation, includes pause prompts at the appropriate point, and includes information for the teacher to help use these effectively.  The instructions walk the teacher through the video step by step with associated screen shots so you know what is happening.

I counted at least 40 videos on a variety of topics including solving one and two step equations, probability, area, mean, operations on integers, and so many other topics.  It is just a matter of looking through them to decide if these activities work best for a lesson or to reinforce certain skills, or perhaps to allow practice to hypothesizing, testing, etc.

This site was created by the Make Math Moments guys who gave the webinar I attended early Saturday morning.  I love having access to these because as teachers we are told to use multiple representations and we don't always know how to create them for certain concepts.  This helps.  I have students whose basic skills are way below grade level so I can use some of these to help strengthen skills like applying the four operations to negative numbers.

Check the site out and let me know what you think.  I am glad I was directed to the site because I can use them today.  Have a great day.