When I meet someone new at a party and we exchange the customary small talk (“What about this weather?” or “How about those Giants?”), inevitably the question of what I do for a living comes up. Even before I share that I have been a middle school math teacher for 25 years, I can pretty […]
Counting Collections is a structured opportunity for students to count a collection of objects. In doing so, students develop strategies for organizing their collections, keeping track of their counting, and ultimately develop a concrete understanding of base ten place value system. Today I had the pleasure of observing a wonderful teacher as she led her kindergarten […]
Whenever I feel compelled to give unsolicited advice to teachers new to the profession, I give the following three suggestions: Stay curious. Always be willing to learn new things. Stay humble. Always be willing to unlearn things you thought were true, but aren’t. Begin each day with a reminder to yourself that you really, really […]
PROBLEM 1 The key strategy on this problem is to be super precise with your counting. For example, by treating 1×2 rectangles as DIFFERENT from 2×1 rectangles, you will see some pretty awesome patterns. Start by counting the 1-by’s and you will see there are 60 of them. You might also see a nice pattern. […]
This is the third of a multi-part series of posts sharing ideas for how to teach fraction concepts and operations through the use of visual representations. There is tons of evidence that students learn math better when the math is accompanied by visuals, so let’s dig into fractions… Suppose we want to add and and […]
I recently received a wonderful email from a mathematical leader at a local junior high school. She had two great questions, so I thought I’d turn my response into this short blog post. I separated her questions with my responses. Read on… 1.) How do we connect the Concrete and Representational to the Abstract in […]
What grade do U.S. preschools deserve in math instruction? Math is nearly absent in American preschools and prekindergarten classes. One study calculated that at preschools where kids spend six hours a day, math gets an average of only 58 seconds per day. Not even a full minute. I thought this was interesting, so I thought […]
To prevent the rise of math anxiety in elementary students, teachers need confidence in their own conceptual understanding of the subject. For many students (and many adults), just hearing the word math can send a chill down their spine. I thought this was interesting, so I thought I would repost it here. Here is where I […]
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money’s newsletter. You can sign up here. According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all 3-year-olds and a third of all 4-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. I thought this was interesting, so I thought I […]
“In this large, randomized study we found that when it comes to enhancing mathematical learning in young children, the type of cognitive training performed plays a significant role,” says corresponding author Torkel Klingberg, professor in the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. I thought this was interesting, so I thought I would repost it here. Here […]