Math Strategies at Home Part 1
One of the common things we hear at school is that “My child gets frustrated with me when I try to teach math or help with homework because their teacher does not teach it that way!”
This can definitely lead to homework angst on both the part of the parent and the child.
So – in the spirit of helping parents “teach like the teacher”, I will be sharing strategies for math that your child is learning at school over the next few blogs, from primary strategies to junior to intermediate.
In general – keep it fun through play, make it real using examples of how you can use math or find math concepts in the home, and know when to call it a night when it becomes too much of a battle. (This applies to all of the other subject areas too!)
The following is taken from “UGDSB Home Tip Sheet: Strategies to Add, Subtract, Multiply and Divide” as authored by our hard-working program department.
Why are we teaching strategies versus going straight to memorization?
- Strategies help students find an answer even if they forget what was memorized. Discussing math fact strategies focuses attention on number sense, operations, patterns, properties, and other critical number concepts
- Children should learn their number facts. However, they would benefit from learning these facts by using an increasingly sophisticated series of strategies rather than jumping directly to memorization. (As cited in http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/teachers/teacher_guide_math_en.pdf)
Below are two images that contain the first 6 strategies.
There were many examples of how these strategies are applied in my previous blogs in the pictures of student work.
Stay tuned next week for subtraction strategies!
Download a copy of the full document here:
Categories: Principal's Blog