Deb’s Mathematics Blog

When looking at the list of recommended blogs, I decided that it would be most helpful to look at some math blogs.  Therefore I went to the link, movingforward – Education Blogs by Discipline.  I looked at several of the math logs.  Many were for younger students.  I thought a few were very interesting, especially Dan Meyer’s, Jason Dyer’s and Deb’s Mathematics Blog.  In the end, after printing out some very useful Algebra worksheets, I decided to focus on Deb’s Mathematics Blog.

It is very exciting for me to look at these math blogs.  It feels like a whole new world of math, although it is a bit overwhelming.  I like Deb’s blog because it focuses a lot on teaching math.  There were several posts with great links for free math worksheets.  One post talked about the benefits of students writing math journals in class.  Math journals are helpful because the students are better able to remember how to solve problems by writing down the steps.  Also, by writing a journal, students are forced to really think about how each math problem is solved. 

Another post that I found to be useful was about SAT problems.  My classes always begin with a warm up problem.  This SAT post had many links to some excellent SAT questions.  I will definitely use some of them as warm up problems.  Lastly, a teacher wrote a post saying that she loved to use math quotes in class.  Periodically, she will write a quote on the board and have a short discussion with the students about the quote.  I thought that this was an excellent idea for my classes.  Of course, math can be a bit of a dry subject.  It is always nice to be able to mix things up a little.