YouCubed!!

After Looking at the YouCubed website I was impressed. Not only does it reach out to teachers with resources and materials to help them teach math in an easier way for students to learn and understand, but it also has plenty of material for parents/guardians to help as well! 

This site is devoted to teachers and parents/guardians to help them understand that children need to be taught math in a way that illuminates stress and anxiety and having a mindset where they think they aren't smart enough to complete a problem. I learned through watching the videos and reading the articles posted, that all children can achieve at high levels; everyones brain grows and expands when it learns new information. Previous ideas about students' ability levels can effect a students math performance; if a child thinks they aren't good at math because they don't understand or cannot complete a certain number of problems as quickly as others, they will preform at the level they think they are. In this scenario, the performance would be poor. Students need to understand that mistakes and struggling are important because that means you're learning and your brain is growing. If students know how to complete every single problem, that means they aren't learning and aren't being challenged. A big idea for teachers, parents/guardians, and students to understand is that math should not be associated with speed and time constraints. This can cause a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety on students because they learn to believe that if they can't complete the problems in a certain amount of time, they're not good enough, when this isn't true at all. Another thing this website discussed is what teachers say to students, greatly impacts their performance levels. Giving positive feedback and letting the student know that you believe in them, gives students motivation to do their best.

I really loved the article for parents, that talked about ways to encourage students to complete math, as well as ways to motivate them. As a parent, you want to help your child with what they are struggling with, this article explains that in order to help that child, don't complete the hard parts of the problem for them. Instead, you help guide them through the problem. If they figure a problem out, you shouldn't reply with, "wow, you're so smart," because in the future, if the child struggles with figuring something out, they will think, "hmm, maybe i'm not so smart." So instead of using the word "smart" you could just praise the student by saying, "wow, great job! I knew you could do it!" As a future teacher, these kinds of things would be helpful to let parents/guardians know, as they help their children with homework.

YouCubed also offers games for students from kindergarten to grade five, to play. I thought this was a very useful resource, because I myself have never heard of any of these games and I think they would be fun to play with friends, not just in school but in the home environment as well!

I believe that the resources this site has to offer to help teachers and parents/guardians alike are unexpendable to help teach math to the current and future generations.