Last night another colleague and I conducted a Parent Math meeting or mini workshop. This was an opportunity for parents to come and learn innovated math that their students are using in our school. Our math curriculum doesn't start using the standard algorithm math to solve additions, subtractions, multiplications or divisions, instead we use math concepts that allow students to gain the reasoning behind the operation rather than the procedure to get an answer from an operation. Unfortunately, many of our kids don't make great gains because they don't get any math support at home. Thus, we provided a workshop so our parents can understand the logic of this curriculum and to introduce different math games they can play at home that will support their students learning. From this workshop I learned many things about our parents, a few that I can think of are:
- Some parents don't know any math themselves, to add 11 plus 8 some were using their fingers.
- Some parents don't believe in innovated math, because an older child did well using the standard algorithm, thus they don't understand why we use manipulatives.
- Some parents want to keep learning the innovated math, because they noticed that their child can greatly benefit from this methods.
- Some parents want to learn to read and count because they don't know how.
Now that I know our parents more, I think I can speak on their behalf and try to put more workshops that they can benefit from.
It was tiring to do a workshop for two hours, cleaning afterward and arriving home close to 9 at night, but the feeling of fulfilling is great, the long day was well worth it.
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