Homeschool Math Blog

Kent Haines is both a math teacher and a dad. In this video, he shares some excellent tips on how to help your children's "math-readiness", expressing it with a modern term. Or we might just say, how to help your children understand their world with math. It's aimed at parents of little children but the ideas ring true for other ages too: The three important guidelines he shares are: 1. Use math language. 2. Play. 3. Focus on questions, not on answers. I enjoyed the video!

Someone asked for help to explain the concepts of multiplicative word problems involving "as many as", like the ones below: 1) Haley had four times as many dollars as her sister. Together they had $60. How much money does Haley have? 2) Rachel had 5 times as many dollars as her sister, Nora. They had a total of $90. How much money did each of them have? The BAR MODEL is an excellent tool for helping children understand what is going on in these types of word problems. In (1), draw a bar for Haley and another for her sister. Divide Haley's bar into four parts, and make the other bar just one such part long. Haley |---|---|---|---| Sister |---| Now you will see that the TOTAL needs divided into FIVE equal parts — and from then on it is easy-peasy. Additionally, you can use Thinking Blocks website to build such bar models INTERACTIVELY. For problems like (1) and (2) above, choose the fourth model from the left (rightmost) in the top row that is b...

Homeschool Buyers Co-op is running a FLASH SALE for the large Math Mammoth bundles — get them at 40% off! This sale ends on July 17, 2017.

If you have a few minutes, check out http://tjzager.com/2017/06/17/representations-and-manipulatives-and-tools-and-things/ It's an interesting and encouraging read. Thoughts about technology (no need for it at every turn), and how to teach those who don't love math, and how just a piece of graph paper can lend itself to a powerful learning tool...!