peacefully
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Posts posted by peacefully
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:big ear: I've been looking at these too.
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Exactly what I needed! Thanks so much for posting! :001_smile:
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Seriously! Ds is also fascinated by huge numbers. The other week, I caught him having a discussion with an older cousin, where the cousin was trying to explain exponential notation to my ds. When I asked what was going on, ds said with feverish excitement, "Mom, [cousin] is going to show me the difference between a googol and a googolplex!"
:001_huh:
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She'll do fine with the teddy bears (and with being cute!). :D You can do part-whole relationships, base-ten concepts, and place value with teddy bears (I wasn't kidding about gluing them to a stick). There is a tendency, though, to use these counters only as individual units for, well... counting, and then most of the value of using manipulatives at all is pretty much lost. There are better manipulatives that illustrate mathematical concepts, but hey, if teddy bears are the ticket to get your girl to love math, go for it. The teddy bear window will be a short one anyway, and after a while, the math will get to the point when your ds will want a ten-rod (or something else that represents ten), because it's a more efficient way to help her model the problem.
What I'm learning from this thread is that I should never ever take my little girl to the teacher supply store. She's quite happy with her Jumbo C-rods.
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Ever one to have my cake and eat it too, I would go ahead and use the teddy bears (sorry, Bill) BUT each bear would always have to live in its own little room on a ten-frame mat (or egg carton). When the little teddy bear family grows, each bear would get their own room in the twenty-frame hotel. And finally, when there are enough bears for the bear village to send some off exploring, groups of ten would get glued to their canoes (extra-large craft sticks). :D
Bill does have a point. Ideally, manipulatives won't be used just as counters but used to show the mathematical relationships among numbers. Giving a kid a strong start in the base-ten number system and place value concepts is really, really important.
I don't think there's anything particularly magical (or damaging) about any particular manipulative though. It's up to the teacher to use the manipulative in a way that illustrates the concepts.
Having said that, my little girl will use counting bears as a manipulative Over. My. Dead. Body. :lol:
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Whew! Thanks for the help, everyone. I'm going to just go with it. Ds is 2E in ways that I'm just now starting to figure out. I was not expecting him to have this kind of insight into math, and I'm a little stumped by some of his approaches. I'm the kind of learner who likes to follow the steps in the textbook. And he's... not. :001_huh:
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I'm glad I'm not the only one in this boat. :) The thing is, he doesn't have to write down any steps anyway. Ds does mental math problems as warm-ups, and every once in a while, I ask him to explain how he got an answer. Sometimes I also make him show me how to represent his solution with manipulatives. He has to do this whether his answers are right or wrong. It's just part of our math lesson. That was when I first learned that he was working out his subtraction problems this way.
At first, I could not for the life of me figure out what he was doing with his units. I think the problem was 40-15, and I actually said, "No, you can not take 5 from a zero," to which he replied, "Yes, you can, Mom, and it's negative 5 units." :001_huh: Then he said that he has 3 tens and negative 5, so the answer is 25.
Because I grew up on the standard "borrowing" algorithm, it took me several minutes to figure out that he might be on to something, but I'm concerned that his way is really only workable for 2-digit problems. Maybe I should just let it go? Perhaps he'll figure out a different solution when we start doing mental math problems with bigger numbers.
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My 6yo is fascinated with negative numbers and has been for a while. The last few days he has been wanting to do his mental subtraction problems this way.
Example:
62-38=
(60-30)+(2-8)=
30+(-6)=24
He worked this out himself, and he insists that this is an acceptable way to work subtraction with regrouping problems ("It totally makes sense this way, Mom!").
I am not a mathy person at all. It seems to me that this should be okay, but what the heck do I know? Is there any reason why he shouldn't use this method? Is it going to cause confusion later on down the road?
For example, the only way I can figure out a problem like this requires so many more steps. It seems so inefficient compared to the standard algorithm (with vertical subtraction).
2457-1989=
(2000-1000)+(400-900)+(50-80)+(7-9)
1000-500-30-2
500-30-2
470-2
468
Do I let him continue to use his method? Just for mental math? I'm really out of my element here so any input would be helpful.
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WWYD? 6 yo says he doesn't enjoy his math
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
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