Following are some snippets about math I've gleaned from various places on the Internet. Leave a comment below to add one of your best math procedures or ideas.
Oregon teacher, Jane Osborne, uses this game to work with her students to develop understanding of number bonds. "I ended up taking three hula hoops one year to add in a more kinesthetic
approach. I
took 10 students at a time and rolled the dice. 4 of them moved into
one hula hoop and the other 6 crowded into the other. Then we got back
together as a group of 10, I rolled the dice again, and we split into
two pairs again. It really took 4 rounds of this moving in variations
of 10 before many of them finally got it. But it sure did pay off in
future lessons!"
The National Research Council
book, Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics defines
procedural fluency as the "knowledge of procedures, knowledge of when and how
to use them appropriately, and skill in performing them flexibly, accurately,
and efficiently." Students need to know their math facts and to think in order to apply appropriate procedures when solving math problems.
On the subject of timed math facts tests: "Do not subject any student
to fact drills unless the student has developed an efficient strategy
for the fats included in the drill...Drill prior to development of
efficient methods is simply a waste of precious instructional time," (Van DeWalle, John A. Elementary and Middle School Math).
Number sense plays a critical role in a student's math development and especially with their success with higher-level mathematics. Is it really that big a deal? Consider this. "Lack of number sense has led to more catastrophic errors, such as the Hubble Telescope missing the stars it was intended to photograph in space. The telescope was looking for stars in a certain cluster but failed due to someone making an arithmetic error in the programming of the telescope" (LA Times, 1990).
