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( ... There ... Are we alone now? Well then ... )
Welcome, Teachers and Parents!
| This corner of Math Cats is for those of us who want to help the kids in our lives to thrive on the joys of math. In this one area of Math Cats, I greet you as Wendy Petti, a parent of three children (ages 13 - 24) and | |
| a teacher for over 18 years. I created Math Cats for children to promote open-ended and playful explorations of important math concepts. In this corner, we as educators will look at ways to make the most of mathematical opportunities, here at Math Cats and in the world around us. |
 photo by Emily Petti, age 7 |
great math activities and resources suggested by teachers*
1) approaches to math instruction
There will be more Idea Banks coming soon!
* Many of these ideas have been shared by teachers for teachers at "teachers.net" and are used with permission, whenever it was possible to contact the authors.
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I hope you poke around the Math Cats site and think about how these activities can be used to enrich children's mathematical understandings. I would like particularly to encourage you to invest a few minutes to download and install the free MicroWorlds plug-in. My main motivation in creating Math Cats was to share the MicroWorlds projects which I developed with and for my students over many years. If you don't get the free plug-in and explore the MicroWorlds projects, you're missing most of the math fun at Math Cats!
A word about my background:
I've worked with the youngest tots all the way up through tutoring and teaching at the college level, and I've provided training and support for teachers in several areas of the curriculum (math, creative writing, and Information Technology). I've completed a B.A. in psychology, an M.A.T. in secondary English, and extra graduate work for certification in elementary education. I've taught in public and private schools in five states from coast to coast. I have spent the bulk of my teaching career working with elementary school children. My students each year (as in most classrooms) spanned a wide range of abilities and maturity levels; in a typical class I'd have children with learning disabilities and other learning difficulties and children whose academic gifts were awesome, with plenty of children in between. After many years as a classroom teacher, eventually I began to specialize in Information Technology. From 1992 - June 2000 I was an I.T. teacher for many classes of students each week at a private school in Washington, D.C., and I've recently returned to that school, teaching fourth and fifth grade math. Throughout my varied experiences as an educator, I looked for ways to make learning relevant, open-ended, creative, hands-on, and fun. I'm now trying to bring the best of my experiences and the best of myself to Math Cats.
Just one more thing... I would really appreciate your feedback about Math Cats and your input about what you would like to see added to the site. Or let me know how you might plan to use Math Cats with the kids in your life.
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(Here is Emily, my daughter, who took the photo of me above. At this moment in early September 2001 we were just bringing two dear kitties home from a farm in Amish country to become our "real" math cats. They are Huggles and Oreo. They are full-grown now. They love to sit on my lap and help me type, and sometimes they sit or lie on the keyboard. Oreo is resting his head on the edge of the keyboard as I type these words!! You can read more about them in the Young Hunters story on the Cat Tails page.) |
| © copyright 2000 - by Wendy Petti of Math Cats. All Rights Reserved. |
