Becoming Mathematicians

We began our first lesson by deciding what a good mathematician does. I found this cute little activity from Amy Lemons great blog here. This was a bit hard for some of the students to get their heads around. many of them answered, "Does math really good." I gave a few examples and then helped prompt them for a few before they started to get the idea and came up with some good ideas on their own. We created an anchor chart to put up in the classroom throughout this unit. To help solidify the idea of the students seeing themselves as mathematicians, we made self portraits with speech bubbles. in the speech bubble they wrote "I can.." or "I..." and what it is that they do in Math that makes them a good mathematician. You can see them in the photo below. They turned out cute! I loved that one of my girls wrote, "I do not give up. FOREVER."

Our Mathematician Chart

We also looked at these cute little Mathematician posters. They go through the parts of the body and how each part helps you do math. I bought these posters from Teachers pay Teachers for $1 and found them here. I liked how demonstrated the idea that mathematicians use all parts of their body to do Math.

Mathematician Posters above our sink