Gone are the days when teaching should be uniform, as education has evolved, we have come to see that each student learns in their own unique way. What better way to reach out to students and instill a love for mathematics than offering them a variety of strategies they can use to solve a problem in a way that makes sense to them. Do you have a trick that will help students with mental math? I'd love to hear from you and add it to my bag of tricks so that I can share it with my students.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Multiple Ways To Multiply
As an occasional teacher, I see different students every day with very different abilities and understandings when it comes to a variety of subjects. Gaps in education, math in particular, are inevitable and as an occasional teacher who is only working with students with gaps for a short time, I have had to develop a bag of tricks to give students tips and strategies for solving problems. I find that a lot of students struggle with mental math skills and multiplication seems to stump students. When I am working with a class for only a day, it is hard for me to teach the students complex math skills; thus I try to think of strategies I can leave with them that they can take with them and apply to every area of math. So many students turn to their calculator and no longer rely on mental math skills to complete simple multiplication. When it comes to such a crucial skills, I have a few strategies I like to introduce to classes - you never know what strategy may click with a student. In my experience, visual learners really seem to enjoy the Japanese technique of multiplying with lines explained in the following video.
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Hi Kristine, I really enjoyed ur video and I m sure the students really enjoy this trick and its greatly useful. The video I can recommend is for calculating percentage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWHx0RsRNzI
ReplyDeleteThe video explain to find any percentage we need to only know the value at 100%, 50%, 10% and 5%. Then we could easily find different percentage of the number.
Thanks
Wow Kristin, what an interesting find. It certainly is a neat way of multiplying. I agree with you that students learn in their own unique ways. This trick could help some of these students. It also would be interesting to see which students are intrigued with this method of multiplying and what their abilities are in math, especially the algebra.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great resource that I'm certain students would enjoy and find very useful. I like your "bag of trick" approach to building students skills in math. It can be so refreshing for students to have a new face in the class with new ideas when their regular teacher is away. This method of multiplying is something I will show my own two children to help them build their own bank of strategies.
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