How to Teach Math to a Struggling Student

photo by MC Quinn via flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Paraphrased from a homeschool math discussion forum:

“Help! My daughter struggles with arithmetic. I guess she is like me: just not a math person. She is an outstanding reader. When we do word problems, she usually has no trouble. She’s a whiz at strategy games and beats her dad at chess every time. But numbers — yikes! When we play Yahtzee, she gets lost trying to add up her score. The simple basics of adding and subtracting confuse her.

“Since I find math difficult myself, it’s hard for me to know what she needs. What’s missing to make it click for her? She used to think math was fun and tested well above grade level, but I listened to some well-meaning advice and totally changed the way we were schooling. I switched from using workbooks and games to using Saxon math, and she got extremely frustrated. Now she hates math.”

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Math Games by Kids

Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

The cold came back and knocked me flat, but there are compensations. The downtime gave me a chance to browse my overflowing bookmarks folder, and I found something to add to my resource page. Princess Kitten and I enjoyed exploring these games and quizzes from Ambleweb.

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Backwards Math

Photo by Complicated.

Princess Kitten is recovering from her cold and getting some energy back. She came to me and said wistfully, “I wish I could do backwards math.”

I looked up from my keyboard. “Backwards math? What do you mean?”

“Umm. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I can show you.”

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Happy Pi Day II

[Feature photo above by pauladamsmith.]

Now there is an ancient Greek letter,
And I think no other is better.
It isn’t too tall,
It might look very small,
But its digits, they go on forever.

— Scott
Mrs. Mitchell’s Virtual School

Time to Celebrate

Are your students doing anything special for \pi Day? After two months with no significant break, we are going stir crazy. We need a day off — and what better way could we spend it than to play math all afternoon?

If you need ideas, here are some great \pi pages:

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How Should We Teach Arithmetic?

Dave Marain of MathNotations is running a poll about how to teach multiplication, but the question has broader application:

How should we teach the arithmetic algorithms
— or should we teach them at all?

Algorithms are step-by-step methods for doing something. In arithmetic, we have standard algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and long division. Once the student masters the steps for any particular algorithm, he can follow the steps to a correct answer without ever thinking about what the numbers mean.

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Euclid’s Game on a Hundred Chart

Math concepts: subtraction within 100, number patterns, mental math
Number of players: 2 or 3
Equipment: printed hundred chart (also called a hundred board), and highlighter or translucent disks to mark numbers — or use this online hundred chart

Set Up

Place the hundred chart and highlighter where all players can reach them.

How to Play

  • Allow the youngest player choice of moving first or second; in future games, allow the loser of the last game to choose.
  • The first player chooses a number from 1 to 100 and marks that square on the hundred chart.
  • The second player chooses and marks any other number.
  • On each succeeding turn, the player subtracts any two marked numbers to find and mark a difference that has not yet been taken.
  • Play alternates until no more numbers can be marked.

Continue reading Euclid’s Game on a Hundred Chart

Puzzles for the New Year

by Koshyk via flickr

As we all head back to school, here are some interesting calendar puzzles:

  • 2008 is a leap year. Why do leap years happen? If we didn’t add a leap day every so often, would January eventually come in the summer?
  • Today is Thursday. What day of the week will it be exactly one year from today?
  • January 1, 2008, came on a Tuesday. When will be the next year that begins on Tuesday?
  • My birthday (in March) lands on a Monday this year. When is the next year my birthday will come on a Monday? How about YOUR birthday — when is the next time it will happen on the same day of the week as this year?
  • Can you find a pattern in the way dates move from one day of the week to another, year after year?

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