Author: Shawn Seeley
Dividing Fractions – How and Why
Ask many adults why flipping/inverting/multiplying by the reciprocal works, and you’ll likely find out that they are just as confused now as they were when they were young students. What’s a reciprocal, anyway?
Read More »Multiplying by Multiples of Ten
This third grade standard has its roots in K-2 standards, and is fundamental to understanding more complex mathematical problems, including multi-digit multiplication and division.
Read More »Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.
Ok, here’s the deal: I feel like the way most of us currently assess and view mathematical fluency and ability (timed tests) is complete garbage. Now that I have that out of the way, let me explain myself….
Read More »Four Stages of Learning
As a teacher and parent, I know how much discomfort there is when someone you care about and are heavily invested in, struggles.
Read More »What Do Turtles Have to Do with Multiplication?
When teachers (and other well-meaning adults) can’t explain something in a way that students can understand, sometimes they resort to cute tricks, gimmicks, and shortcuts.
Read More »Playing with Equations
Putting myself into the shoes of a fourth grade student, I can’t imagine a much more dry, repetitive, and boring task than filling out worksheets with numbers that don’t mean anything.
Read More »Teach Them to Fail
There is much to be said about the benefit of failing, especially at a young age. Unfortunately, the “bubble of parental protection” can at times give students (and teachers) a false sense of proficiency, resulting in failure of a summative assessment. Productive struggle and early failure are vital to the learning process, build character and perseverance, and must become the norm.
Read More »You’ll Never Have a Multiplication Unit in Life
Often, we teach math skills in partitioned silos, inadvertently teaching our students to compartmentalize their thoughts, effectively hampering/shutting off their critical-thinking and ability to reason.
Read More »Start With the Heart
Too often, narratives are bogged down in introductions full of superfluous info, causing the heartbeat of their story to flatline because they rushed both it and the conclusion.
Read More »Teach the Math Behind the Methods
Let me start off with a confession: when I was a student, I had no idea what I was doing in math. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of my peers understood what was going…
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