The focus:
- How to teach multiplication /division basic facts.
- How to amplify and turbocharge the teaching of the basic facts.
Donna shared the message from Jo Boaler's that more often than not we create 'maths anxiety' in our learners by expecting them to be able to recall the basic facts in 4 seconds without taking time to ensure we have helped them grow their understanding and number sense. To lessen the chance of this happening we need to introduce strategies using equipment to allow for visual connections to be made, provide opportunities for our learners to practice these strategies using contexts they can connect to, before we ask them to be able to recall from memory.
Strategy
'Basic facts should not just be rote-learnt in isolation from understanding. There is little point knowing what 6 + 7 or 7 × 8 is, if the student has no concept of addition or of multiplication. Teaching needs the joint foci on developing understanding as well as memory.'
Practice
'Doing a wide variety of work that aims to build and enhance strategies, helps reinforce procedures, and understanding of mathematics. Practising strategies also reinforces and continues the process of memorisation.'
Memorise
'This should only come after the students understand the operation, and have some strategies for performing it.'
Donna shared a wide variety of online programs and virtual manipulatives to help us provide the multimodal learning opportunities needed to help a wider audience make their connections. I really enjoyed the hands on opportunity to explore these.
My Takeaways:
- Recall comes when good foundations are laid and understanding grows
- Make use of at NUMPA Book 6
- Continue to grow understanding of the literacy of maths
- Incorporate virtual manipulatives into my program
- Use images to 'find the maths'
- Basic facts should not be rote learned in isolation from understanding
- Continue to use the real worlds of our students with written maths questions to allow connections to be made in context and with understanding.
- Make a virtual maths manipulatives slide so these can be accessed any time by any one from a known place
Resource Links:
- Array Display - a site that shows what times tables look like when drawn as an array. It has the function to change the order of the factors and show what the array would look like as a division.
- Donna's Multiplication site - so many great links here
- Maths Eyes - finding the maths in images
This is fantastic! Thanks so much for sharing, Robyn! I totally agree with children needing to understand before they memorise.
ReplyDeleteI created this times table challenge for our kids during this latest lockdown. Some of them are really getting onboard with the idea of beating their time from the day before. I wanted to make sure the children were not just memorising a times table grid and using earlier strategies (like skip counting) to solve it, hence why I ask them to put random numbers from 1-10 into the yellow boxes. Feel free to use this if you want!
See you online this afternoon!
Hannah
What a great resource Hannah, thank you for sharing! I really struggle to help my learners who fall back on skip counting move past this as their 'go to' strategy so I will definitely make use of this as the randomising is where our gaps are. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteRobyn