#3 Adding 2-digit numbers in your head faster than on a calculator

Date: April 20th, 2015

Tom Schersten: Have you ever been told that when you add, you have to start on the right side? Well, it’s not true. The commutative property of addition says very clearly we can add in any order we want to. This video is going to show you how, when you understand place value, you can […]

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#2 Getting kids from manipulatives to written math

Date: April 8th, 2015

Tom Schersten: Happily, most classrooms in the United States are now using base 10 blocks for modeling place value in the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Unfortunately, teachers are complaining that kids are not making the connection between the concrete operations and the abstract representations with the usual math written symbols. These connections […]

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#1 Using ‘Muscle Numbers’ to teach place value

Date: March 25th, 2015

Tom Schersten: One of the big ideas of elementary math education, perhaps the biggest idea, is that of place value. We teach place value to our kids every single year, and every year we complain that they just don’t seem to get it. I think it’s important to acknowledge that our way of teaching computation […]

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