Math Morning Class

A couple weeks before break, Mr. Chub asked if I would be willing to teach a few math classes for PSE extra practice. Right away I started thinking what time would work the best and came up with Tuesday mornings from 9 to 10. I asked Mr. Ical to announce it during class and mae a little note to put on the bulletin board. Florentina and I put together some problems we were going to give as homework but since we didn't have evening classes the week before break, I now had the preparation done. Of course I still made up some proportional parts problems for fun, just in case. I decided since the class was optional I should reward those for coming with treats-rice "krispi" treats. They would have been better had I used margarine, regular mini marshmallows, and fresh cereal instead of 123 vegetable oil, hard jumbo maple vanilla flavored marshmallows, and stale krispis. Hey! You use what you have. I guess they weren't too bad because I brought back an empty bag and there were only five students. We stayed past ten and really they just wanted a short break and then come back, but I said we could just continue next week. We passed around the volleyball for about a half hour and thought about putting up the next week, which didn't happen, but more about the class. The second week there were seven students. We started with a review of percent profit and discount. I'm not sure how many times they've been over this, but some are still not getting it at all. I've realized I've become one of those people who can understand math, but has a hard time explaining. I need to look for some games or other teaching strategies to help these students learn. I even thought of asking Patricio, one of the students who does understand to try explaining in Ke'kchi, maybe it's the language barrier? The last week I made no-bake cookies for the treat and oh my, I shouldn't have found out how easy they are to make and delicious they are so soon. Ha ha! There were eight students. I was happy to see more faces each week. We went onto ratios and spent most of the time on finding the ratio between two amounts of money, one being in dollars and the other in cents. I was surprised how much trouble the conversion was. I asked, "How many cents are in one dollar?" and got blank stares in response. When they guessed "20?" I rephrased the question and wondered if I had 20 cents and they had one dollar if they would trade me. Of course not, so we went found the answer together using what they knew, 4 shillings in a dollar, each shilling worth 25 cents, 4 times 25 equal what? This is not something I thought I would be teaching to standard 6, but it makes me wondered what other little things they were never taught. Most "learning" is rote memory, for example times tables. I don't remember repeating my times table over and over, so I wonder how I learned to multiply, and if I can think of it, I'll pass this on. My only hope is that I was able to help a little and those few students that came to morning class over break learned something.