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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I’m thrilled to announce that my book has been selected as one of the Top 75 Community College Titles: October 2024 Edition on choice360.org. Choice is a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. My book made it into the Social and Behavioral Sciences category. What do you think about that? Let me know in the comments! Learn more about, and order my book, here!
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Have you ever wondered if there is a better way to understand and remember mathematical order of operations than PEMDAS, BIDMAS, GEMA, or any of the other happy mnemonics that only go so far? It’s been a bugaboo for so many teachers over time. During a recent work trip to St. Croix, USVI, I realized I hadn’t written my thoughts about it in my book. So I wrote a chapter all about it. If you’d like to read the chapter, wonderful! Just sign up to my email list, and you’ll get a link to download it for free. Don’t forget…
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Mobius strips are easy to make. Just glue one end of a strip of paper to the back side of the other end. Then you have a twisted strip. Lots of knitters make Mobius cowls as well. It’s a popular and cozy style. The author of some of the books I’ve used with students, mathematician Richard Evan Schwartz at Brown University, has been puzzling over a problem posed in the 1970s: what’s the shortest strip of paper you can use to make a Mobius strip? After a few years of tinkering, Dr. Schwartz cracked the problem. The key to doing…
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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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Here is a list of websites and apps demonstrated during my session at NYSCATE 2013. EngageNY.org: where you can download the full curriculum modules for free. commoncore.org: access Eureka, the interface for the full math curriculum modules. Number Pieces (Free): Virtual Base 10 blocks and whiteboard AL Abacus ($1.99): Virtual abacus, sometimes called a Rekenrek 10 Frame Fill (Free): Basic ten-frame game/app. Virtual Manipulatives! (Free): Fraction, decimal and percentage tiles Teaching Table ($2.99): Smartboard-like manipulatives and interactivity for math presentations Number Bonds: Addition & Subtraction to 99 ($1.99): Number bonds app for composing and decomposing numbers Bugsy Kindergarten Math ($2.99):…
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A teacher recently asked me a question: “What do I do with the student who is strong enough in his math concepts, but he has no idea about Singapore Math approaches like number bonds, and he starts our school late in the year?” For her and other teachers in the same boat, I’m making this “cheat sheet,” which is targeted at elementary school children who start mid-year in Math in Focus or Primary Mathematics. 1. Number Bonds Number bonds show the ways in which numbers relate to each other. They can also be thought of as “part-whole” pictures, in which you…
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How is it possible to assess a whole classroom in a moment? One great tool for this is pinch strips. To use these, the children are asked a question, for example, “How much is $1 minus 95¢?” The children then pinch the strips on the segment showing the correct answer – in this case, the nickel – and all hold them up to show the teacher. I prepared these pinch strips for lessons on money, and then I realized other teachers would probably find them useful, so here they are. These get printed on card stock and can be folded…
