Before this class, I had rarely thought about how literacy affects a mathematics classroom. Obviously, when we think about math and literacy, the first thing that comes to mind is word problems and understanding and solving them. I had never thought about graphs, charts, or numbers as text before and that it takes an understanding of literacy to be able to decipher these texts. Especially when we focus on the reading strategies like Set Purpose, Make Predictions, Ask Questions, etc. I think all of these can be applied to those same math concepts as well. I know many of us don’t want to “teach reading” in our classrooms or feel that isn’t in our job description but I think that there’s a little bit of “reading” in all of our content areas and to be able to teach our content to the fullest some literacy and reading will be involved. I also think literacy is more important than other people think it to be outside of the ELA content area because our individual content areas are filled with texts and students need to be able to understand those texts. I’m surprised we don’t have more classes that talk about how literacy is impacted in our specific content areas, not even a whole class but something dedicated to math, science, and social studies respectively because I think I still struggle with deciding what is literacy within math and what is not. It’s also hard to think of other texts for math that aren’t word problems or are texts that define literacy in some way and aren’t just talking about math.
I enjoyed how we were about to learn different strategies and teach them in a way. I think it was helpful for us to see all the different strategies we could implement into our future classrooms and different ways to show and use them. My group used the word wall method and I don’t usually think that one is used in math classrooms but we thought of different ways to incorporate it and have the students involved. I think that will definitely be a part of my classroom in the future in one way or another. I also liked seeing different groups present their strategies and seeing how they used it for a science concept and how I might be able to implement that into a math classroom. For example, the “sketching a text” method could definitely be used for multi-step word problems or problems that could be easier seen than thinking about abstractly. One major thing I have also taken away from this class is analyzing a text in different ways. Before our class, I hadn’t even thought about texts as having biased authors especially when it comes to journals or textbooks. I had this idea that they were written from a neutral or unbiased view, but as we learned in class every text has an author and that author wants to show you something from the text so they are going to get their point across however they can. I also like the idea of the Think Alouds because I feel like even when I’m doing homework problems or reading a difficult text, I read aloud/talk to myself to do some of the reading strategies but now that we have learned more about them and their uses it’s easier to use and define them. Instead of just reading a text for school and “getting through it” I can ask myself questions to think deeper about the text or make connections to prior learning or even outside connections to make the text more applicable to my life/learning.
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Before this class, I had rarely thought about how literacy affects a mathematics classroom. Obviously, when we think about math and literacy, the first thing that comes to mind is word problems and understanding and solving them. I had never thought about graphs, charts, or numbers as text before and that it takes an understanding of literacy to be able to decipher these texts. Especially when we focus on the reading strategies like Set Purpose, Make Predictions, Ask Questions, etc. I think all of these can be applied to those same math concepts as well. I know many of us don’t want to “teach reading” in our classrooms or feel that isn’t in our job description but I think that there’s a little bit of “reading” in all of our content areas and to be able to teach our content to the fullest some literacy and reading will be involved. I also think literacy is more important than other people think it to be outside of the ELA content area because our individual content areas are filled with texts and students need to be able to understand those texts. I’m surprised we don’t have more classes that talk about how literacy is impacted in our specific content areas, not even a whole class but something dedicated to math, science, and social studies respectively because I think I still struggle with deciding what is literacy within math and what is not. It’s also hard to think of other texts for math that aren’t word problems or are texts that define literacy in some way and aren’t just talking about math. 
I enjoyed how we were about to learn different strategies and teach them in a way. I think it was helpful for us to see all the different strategies we could implement into our future classrooms and different ways to show and use them. My group used the word wall method and I don’t usually think that one is used in math classrooms but we thought of different ways to incorporate it and have the students involved. I think that will definitely be a part of my classroom in the future in one way or another. I also liked seeing different groups present their strategies and seeing how they used it for a science concept and how I might be able to implement that into a math classroom. For example, the “sketching a text” method could definitely be used for multi-step word problems or problems that could be easier seen than thinking about abstractly. One major thing I have also taken away from this class is analyzing a text in different ways. Before our class, I hadn’t even thought about texts as having biased authors especially when it comes to journals or textbooks. I had this idea that they were written from a neutral or unbiased view, but as we learned in class every text has an author and that author wants to show you something from the text so they are going to get their point across however they can. I also like the idea of the Think Alouds because I feel like even when I’m doing homework problems or reading a difficult text, I read aloud/talk to myself to do some of the reading strategies but now that we have learned more about them and their uses it’s easier to use and define them. Instead of just reading a text for school and “getting through it” I can ask myself questions to think deeper about the text or make connections to prior learning or even outside connections to make the text more applicable to my life/learning. 
