Final Project
Throughout the semester you will complete parts of a
portfolio. Pieces of this project will be collected and counted as
your weekly questions. A
complete, organised, well-presented compilation of all materials is
due on the last day of class. When this becomes a project
instead of just weekly questions, please remove questions, dates,
and the "assignment" look of the weekly questions. Put it
together to make a coherent whole. Feel free to change the
sequence if you think it makes more sense that way.
Your project will be checked for inclusion of all assigned topics
and will be evaluated based on the clarity and accuracy of the
explanations given as well as the overall presentation (neat, easy
to find sections and entries, easy to read, well-written, & c).
It is possible that portions of this project can be adapted to be
included in a portfolio for use when interviewing for teaching jobs
to demonstrate your deep understanding of the content of the
elementary mathematics curriculum.
Somewhere in this portfolio you must demonstrate at least one
(several would be better) appropriate use of each of the following manipulatives
pattern blocks
color tiles
dice
geoboard
compass
protractor
I encourage you to organise your project in a sequence that makes
sense to you, as many of these topics will be connected.
Please include in your project a "story" for 141. As a
demonstration for what this means, here is a story of 140:
"In Math 140 we learned about numbers. After a tiny bit in the
beginning about problem solving, we began by considering how to
represent numbers, and different number systems used around the
world throughout history. After that we settled in to using
the Hindu-Arabic numerals used around the world today. We
learned about place value, and then applied our newfound system to
working with operations on numbers. We learned about addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division for natural numbers, and
how to work with them for any size natural numbers. We took a
brief break from operations and number systems to learn about some
properties of numbers. We talked about the importance of prime
numbers and how they were useful for finding greatest common divisor
and least common multiple. We then thought about more than
just natural numbers. We extended to integers and checked that
we could continue to use all of our operations for them. We
then took a big jump to rational numbers - which were tricky because
there are so many different ways to represent rational numbers -
fractions, decimals, and percents, and even different ways to
represent one number as different fractions. We again
discussed each of our operations with fractions and decimals, and
then talked about how to convert between fractions and
decimals. When doing this, we discovered there are some
numbers that can be written as decimals but not as fractions.
They are the irrational numbers. Finally, we ended with a
little discussion about percents, ratios, and proportions."
Somewhere in your final project, please tell me a story of
141.