Today our cohort had the opportunity to attend three of Carole Fullerton’s Professional development sessions for primary, intermediate, and secondary. Experiencing math from Carole Fullerton’s perspective on numeracy is very interesting and empowering to new teachers entering the field. Carole discussed the resilience of students in her session, and highlighted that children are losing their resilience in math and numeracy. Some questions that Carole asked and answered are how can we make math fun? How can we make it easy to understand? How can we use manipulatives to help give students a visual for their learning?

Carole discussed that students should be feeling competent and able, and hopefully confident when doing math. It is upsetting as a teacher to see students feel unmotivated, or like they cannot accomplish something. By using manipulatives and teaching math in a way that students are engaged in their learning, teachers are showing students that they can do it, and students are realizing this. Math is challenging and involves a lot of critical thinking and problem solving, but teachers should be teaching resilience. It is okay for math to be challenging, and in fact it should be challenging, but students should have success in their learning, and this is my responsibility as a teacher.  

We played with and used Cuisenaire manipulatives, which is something I will take forward in my practice. The rods are color coded, and you can change the values of them to practice fractions. However, you can also do very simple math with them by showing different ways to make 5, 10, or any number between 1-10. You can also use them for measurement. The short white rod, for example, is 1cm, in length, red is 2 cm, etc., so they can be used to physically measure an object. Tools like Cuisenaire rods are valuable assets to kids’ educations because they bring attention to number sense and give visuals for students to have a deeper understanding of what a number is and means.