Check out my Math Pinterest Board for more pins related to Math for K-8.
- The use of manipulatives helps all learners visualize, and therefore, solidify conceptual understanding. It is vital for students struggling to learn math. This is true for the youngest students as well as middle and high school students.
- Meeting with small groups in reading is a given, but math? There are several ideas out there about how to construct your math block so that you can meet with small groups. Math workshop, Daily Math, and BUILD are just a few!
- Differentiation menus make "seatwork" more interesting. The very idea that the students get to choose motivates them to complete the work. I would recommend using the menu format for review and/or early finishers.
- I can not over emphasize the importance of using a 100 or 120 board to help students internalize number sense. Even middle school students struggle with mental math, and through activities using a hundreds board, they can internalize simple place value and patterns.
- Another area that can not be over emphasized is place value. This is the foundation of so many math concepts. For any elementary classroom, and in most middle school classrooms, a place value center is a must. There are literally thousands of ways to develop place value understanding.
- Most math teachers will agree that practice makes perfect. However, students get easily bored with worksheets. Mix it up. Here's a site with tons of games using a simple deck of cards. The Dollar Tree usually has two decks of cards for $1!
- Math vocabulary is another area students lack. Creating a visual math-word-wall is a great technique to help students remember important math words.
- Once basic number sense to 120 and place value is solid, the next step is to develop a deep understanding of fractions. This is an area where many students begin to fall apart in math (likely because their whole number sense was sketchy to begin with). This website has lots of free tools to model fraction problems. Understanding the relationship between numbers helps not only with whole number sense, but fractions as well. Continually referring to the "whole" and the "part" will help students understand this abstract concept.
- See below for a teacher's very visual, unique way of introducing integers!
- Ah, problem solving, everyone's favorite part of math. Choosing one of the many problem solving strategies and modeling think alouds using the strategy for many problems each week all through the year will help students learn this skill. However, if their number sense is not solid, problem solving will be almost an impossible concept to master.
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