First class

 

Hello everyone!

Everything has a beginning. And when we speak of primary school students, this begining must be full of motivation and enthusiasm. It is well known that most students, regardless of the course they are, "hate" everything related to the subject of Mathematics. But what these students do not know is that mathematics is in our day to day, and without they know it, they "love" Mathematics.

Therefore, in this post I would like to talk about how we can motivate the students at the beginning of the course so that they have a positive predisposition towards the subject of Mathematics, especially Geometry.

As adults/teachers, we find the motivation to learn something when we find concepts that we do not know and therefore they arouse curiosity. Once this curiosity has reached us, we make available all possible means to find an answer to the question raised.

Therefore, motivation linked to curiosity leads to learning something new. The same thing happens in elementary school students, although unlike adults, they may not yet have the capacity to find the resources or tools necessary to answer the questions they are asked.

It is at this point that the teacher has to intervene and, on the one hand, make available to the students resources that motivate them and arouse curiosity to know what is presented to them, and, on the other hand, to give the necessary tools so that they themselves or with the teacher's help solve the initial doubts.

Thus, any kind of geometry class has to start with a motivating element in which is what we want to teach the students and, therefore, lead to the curiosity of it.

First of all, we should look for those foci that motivate the students of today, which are quite obvious. If the students are smaller, we must use a lot of audiovisual content to attract their attention, on the contrary, with the older students we can introduce the management of new technologies.

In both cases, the visual elements are very important. That's why, I think that starting with a video is a great idea so students are motivated and arouse curiosity about the knowledge that we will later see in class.

The video that would be used for this would be a classic: Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land  (spanish version). This video allows us to introduce a large amount of content that we can work on throughout the course and what we are going to do in this blog.

In each entry we will comment on a part of the video, as well as the contents that we can work on the fragment, games and experiments that can be carried out in class.

I hope you enjoy this trip through Mathmagic Land!

Marta