DMI Chapter 5

One thing I got from Eleanor's case in chapter 5 of the DMI book is how important it is to have an understanding of where the children are in their learning. Taking notes and work samples are one way to keep track of how their thinking has progressed (or not progressed). It is important to analyze your own teaching, what the children are learning, and how you can better support them in their development. The question I have is how you support all the children in their learning so the information being taught is not to hard or to easy for one particular child.

Also, with the DMI Chapter I really thought about how the type of problems that are given to students need to be well thought out. In Lauren's case when she gave the problems:

2 x 4
3 x 4
2 x 40
20 x 4
23 x 4

She allowed for her students to think through the problems and analyze how a problem they already know can help them with a "harder" problem. The other thing I liked about this case is how the children were excited about learning and instead of the learning process being a struggle it became a game as to how big of a multiplication problem they children could solve.

Overall, I really liked this chapter because I feel that many of the ideas that were in the text could be pulled out and be useful in other circumstances or grade levels. Also, being able to read the case studies allows for a context which a certain idea was used. This gives me more of an understanding of how it could be used in my future classroom.