Twitter Math Camp Take-Aways

A summary of what I want to remember from Twitter Math Camp this year. 

Important reminders:

- “We’re not empowering students, they already have power. We are cultivating their power and often need to get out of the way. “ –Jose Luis Vilson

- “Comments with a grade are a waste of time” – Julie Wright

- “Never skip the close” – Tracy Zager

- “Kids notice vertical patterns [in a table] intuitively, not so much horizontally” – Graham Fletcher

New things to consider:

- Mathematical structure definition from Jasper DeAntonio, Kaitlin Ruggiero, David Wees

- Intersection between “showing your work” and “doing the work” from Jose Vilson

- Subtracting a negative number is the most challenging part of integer operations. Here are some of the things that students need to understand from Christy Pettis and Aran Glancy

• “Students need to decide for themselves that adding a 0 [pair] is sensible and allowed”
• “Students need to decide that an equal # of [negatives] and [positives] really can be thought of as 0”
• “Students need to experience subtraction makes larger”

- The components of an instructional routine

Things I want to implement this upcoming year:

- Splitting up the table to reflect structure in a visual pattern

Resources to look into:

- Floats and Anchors game for integer addition and subtraction

- Snag It

- Sam Shah’s version of Explore Math