Lately I have focused a great deal of my planning on Higher Order Questioning techniques. I have tried my hardest to to create meaningful questions within my math lessons to force the students to make meaninful connections between what they are learning in class and the real world. I thought that this would ultimately increase their success rate on unit assessments. To my dissappointment, I was wrong. Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure my questioning did them no harm, but I can't be sure that it provided the best result. My students are still lacking that connection to the real world that allows them to be flexible with numbers and reason within the context of a real world scenario. I thought they were going to be much more successful on this last unit assessment, and they actually scored much worse than previous assessments. I think to myself at this point, what can I do to help them make these connection? What can I do to make math meaningful and relevant to their lives? Although I'm not sure that it is something I can implement this year, so late in the year, and in someone else's classroom, but I surely plan on doing it my first year teaching. Call me ambitious, but I think the solution to my problem is implementing a classroom economy. This would give students an opportunity to use math in a real, meaningful way. They would get experience with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, algebra, and much more. They could interact daily with numbers in a way that was reasonable and made sense to them, because honestly, who doesn't understand numbers better when it comes to money? It would also be a way to hold them accountable for being correct, without the pressure of grading them. If they miscalculate, then they lose money, and if they budget appropriately, then they have opportunities to purchase items from a treasure box which becomes an incentive for correct computation. This is something that they can connect to their future, and they can really see the benefit of learning. This should give them incentive to concentrate on because it's relevant and useful. How much of what we teach can children actually make real world connections to? Can they make the connections without us pointing them out? Do they feel like what we're teaching will be useful to them in their future? Probably not. They can't see what we see. They don't know what we know, after having lived it and wished we'd payed better attention in school. We can't just tell them about how useful these things are and expect them to see the relevance. We ave to provide opportunities for them to see the benefit themselves. I know I will have so much to do my first year, but a classroom economy is something I would really like to implement and measure it's benefits and challenges. I want my students to see for themselves the importance of holding on to the mathemematical concepts learning at the elementary level.