My friend One

 Do you know how many math manipulatives there are? There is a whole glossary of them... Glossary of Manipulatives I have come to love manipulatives.  We were listening to the radio and they talked about using pizza to teach math. So there can be even more manipulatives than just the ones on that page.  I found anglegs and knew I needed them to help teach properties of triangles. Anglegs have different pieces you can snap together to make shapes. The students were able to put together triangles based on the information I gave them and find out for themselves why the properties worked. Here my list of Math Manipulatives I would want and other fun things for math. Nicole's Math Wish List

 Have you ever said that? I never really said that because I always loved math. Then I started teaching students how to do math and there was always a wide range of thoughts. I loved helping students understand the math and that they could do it.  One way to combat that is by having good experiences with math. I always tried to make it fun and find new ways to help math understandable. I may not have always did it, and that goes back to making mistakes. But we did have some fun times in math class even if it wasn't math we were learning. 

Have you ever made a mistake? Just this last week I sent out paychecks without a signature... whoops. If we didn't make mistakes we would never learn. That is one reason I love math. We make mistakes all the time and it helps us grow and understand what to do better the next time.  Completing the square: Anyone know how to do this? I do and I have done it a million time it seems. When I have to teach it to my algebra class I wanted to figure out why we did it that way. So I looked up how to teach it using algebra tiles and as I found out why we needed to complete the square it made more sense to me. was I able to transfer that to the students maybe maybe not but we tried.  Now why this picture? This is an hydrangea, someone has cut all the blossoms off at the wrong time. It has lost the beauty yet they would know this is a mistake unless someone told them you need to wait for the right moment to cut your plants. just like in math.