From reading my previous 6/21 post, I saw that I did not give my student the correct way to solve his math problem. I am still glad that the student was able to figure out the math problem, even if I explained how to get there incorrectly. Hopefully it will at least help if the student can think in terms of "sharing". This shows me that I still need a lot of practice with division problems and thinking about which word problems go with their correct solutions, or the solutions students often come up with.
Moving on to multi digit word problems is easier for me than division because I do not necessarily need to figure out if I should be dealing or chunking in the problem. With that being said, I found it extremely interesting to learn that so much of figuring out multi digit problems has to with understanding how to work with 10's. Since I was pretty much just taught to use the U.S. standard algorithm to figure out multi digit problems, I did not really think about 10's very much, or if I did I didn't know I was. Now that I know how important understanding how to operate with 10's is, this will be an area in which I will really have my students work with.
Another extremely important part of my math curriculum will be to show number sentences in different forms. It was crazy to think that so many students could see that 3+1=4 was always true, but they couldn't see 4=3+1 as being true because they've only been shown the first type of number sentence. I am curious now to see how many problems in the current elementary math books are written in the simple a+b=c form and how many are written in other forms. I am very happy that I have this information and will hopefully be able to teach my students the importance of the information so they are more easily ready when they get to algebra.
No comments:
Post a Comment