Learning Project

For my learning project this year I am hoping to learn to do two different things. One that I think will really benefit my future as a teacher. And the other because it will also sort of benefit my future as a teacher.

First off, I am going to learn how to bake. Because I honestly really enjoy it, but have never gotten past the stage of cupcakes from a box and stick it in the oven and they don’t cook long enough so my Mom saves me and makes them better and thanks Mom I am a failure. The reason this will sort of benefit my future as a teacher is that I made baking for my students once for a birthday (well, my family really saved the day, mine weren’t that great), and I really enjoyed the idea of having rewards and fun little things like baking for my students really helped me feel like I developed a relationship with them. Bribery does wonders, haha.

Seriously though, it was more than that because it was a student who told me her birthday was on Monday so she off-hand mentioned that she could like a birthday snack, and so I made cupcakes. And to see how excited she was that I followed through with my promise when she didn’t expect me to was amazing. I always see a lot of exciting desserts and snacks on all of those blogs online (where I just looked at a few to find some ideas for my post and now I want to make all of the snacks), and I’d like to expand my knowledge and ability in baking to things far more diverse and interesting than just cookies. All the cookies. So many cookies.

 

Secondly, what I am going to do with each recipe, is find a way to incorporate an outcome and make a basic, bare bones lesson plan that I could theoretically use in a classroom. Because I did a very basic cooking assignment in my Grade 8 class involving baking that I really liked and I wished I could have expanded and made the lesson work better. So, I am going to prove to myself that I can make real life math applicable and fun for students. And they would get sweet food out of it, too. My goal is to have a different math class for each recipe, and give a brief description of how the math was involved and what I did with it when I was doing my baking.

I am excited to try this because I found that, in my internship, I tried to do a lot of fun and interesting things, but most of the fun and exciting things I did were not in math, but in other classes instead. I still need to up my inquiry learning game, but I thought a good place to start would be with just finding those connections to real life and to prove to myself that you can incorporate anything into at least some part of your math class, you just have to be creative and actually put in some effort. Which can be a standing metaphor for anything you’d want to incorporate – be it Treaty Ed (which I did do), inquiry, math games, etc.