Imagine my delight to receive an email through my website from a tutor who is using my Resources page with her student in their enrichment work. She shared a website with other resources that James wanted to share with me for my page. I love this so much! At the same time, I feel a responsibility to provide only the best resources to those who visit my site. So I have spent a few days vetting each of those resources, and I’ve added the good ones to my new and improved Resources page! I’ve also reached out to the company…
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A common problem educators face is to make fractions fun and intuitive, especially if their own education was lacking in this respect. One activity I developed that helps with this, and can be done with children of a variety of ages, is Fraction Jacks. What are fraction jacks? They are not the game with the bouncing ball and the funny-shaped pieces, though I’m sure something great could be developed with those. Instead, they are a physical activity that uses kinesthetic intelligence and mind-body connections to understand fractions. Here is how to do them. If you or your students have figured…
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It’s been a while since my last post on iPad apps, and in the meantime a lot has happened. For one thing, I have downloaded and tried quite a number of math apps. I’m going to start a round-up of some of the most useful apps as I have time. First up: exciting news! The Number Bond software, that I lamented being only on Mac or PC for so long, is now ported to iOS. As far as I can tell, having downloaded only the addition/subtraction version, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the computer version. This has its…
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Would you like a fun summer writing project to do with your child? Why not create a comic? Comics and graphic novels are legitimate forms of art and writing, and for visual people, they can be more accessible or relatable. And they require thought and good design to be interesting. This spring, a girl I’ve been tutoring in writing for years made one with my help. First, we wrote the storyboard. Then we laid it out in ComicBook!, an iPad app, with dialogue embedded in bubbles we would edit later to fit the photos. Finally, we took the photos to…
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I’m so inspired about a new tool to enhance math education. A friend sent me the link to a TED talk (embedded at the bottom of this post) showing the evolution of the Khan Academy into something truly useful for – well, for just about anybody. I had come across the Khan videos some time ago, and I thought they were useful and well designed to teach more advanced concepts. Since they were not necessarily pertinent to my work, though, I didn’t return to them. Then I saw this video, and how the Khan Academy has evolved, and I got…
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I recently watched a video of a teacher helping a student master tens and ones using ten frames and unifix cubes. While the video showed some of the ways Singapore Math teaches number sense well, a few things about the teaching style struck me. These are pertinent to tutoring because it was a one-on-one situation. One thing that stood out was that the teacher sometimes gave the answer to the student before the student had a chance to think. This is a mistake that is so easy to make; the tutor knows the answer, and the child doesn’t, so why not tell…
