Some new reviews...

I have recently completed not one, but TWO new reviews for the site. They are

1) YourTeacher.com - online math lessons that consist of video and audio clips, practice problems, solutions to those, "Deep Thought" question, and a quiz.

The list of lessons is long - and thus the amount of material is huge. It covers all topics from prealgebra through algebra 2.

I found the lessons to be very good. Read the review, or visit the website and see their sample lesson.


2) MathScore.com - online math practice environment. This is an intelligent system which catches the student's mistakes and adapts the practice accordingly.

For each topic there are several levels of difficulty, and the student is motivated to compete against him/herself to attain higher levels.

MathScore covers a ton of math topics from grade 2 to algebra 1. MathSCore is NOT only for math facts or basic computation, but includes all sorts of geometry topics, word problems, fractions, proportions, algebra ... all kinds of basic problems that you'd need to practice.

Read my review, or visit MathScore.com and check out their free instant trial.

Calculator activitity for 2nd grade

I would like to know a simple activity that i could do with a grade 2 student, which involves using the calculator.

Here are a few ideas. Hopefully they are of help.

Add or subtract the same number repeated times.

For example, start with 10, subtract 1 repeated times and see how it goes to the negative numbers.

Start with any 2-digit number and add 100 repeated times. Or start with a 3-digit number and subtract 50 or 100 repeated times.

Here's a game: Player 1 chooses a 2-digit number. Player 2 predicts how many times you can subtract 10 before the number becomes negative. Then this is checked with calculator. If player 2 was right, he gets a point. Play till a predetermined amount of points.

Or, use adding. Player 1 chooses a three-digit number, and player 2 has to predict how many times you can add 100 to it before the result is more than 1000. Then check with calculator.

Readers, feel free to submit more ideas in the comments.

Teaching elementary mathematics - don't skip stages

I received recently a book called "Arithmetic for Parents. A book for Grownups about Children's Mathematics" by Ron Aharoni.

I want to tell you a little bit about this book, because I think it is exceptionally good, and a very worthwhile book to read if you're a teacher OR a parent.

Ron Aharoni was like many: he thought he could easily teach elementary school math because he knew college level math and beyond (he was teaching math in a university).

But... he was in for a big surprise when he entered the fourth, fifth, and first grade classes in a backward town in northern Israel, in 2000.

One surprise he had was that...

• ...he did not know how to teach elementary mathematics.

For example, during his first lessons he took children outside to measure shadows of trees, buildings, and the children themselves. The idea was to use the ratio of a child's shadow to his height to find the height of a tree or a building.

He took children outside to draw circles on the pavement and measure diameters, and compare them.

But as he admits in the introduction to his book, his first lessons were just a mess and confusion, with little meaningful teaching going on.

He wanted to do "hands-on experimentations" with children. But he didn't know how to integrate the hands-on experiences into the learning process, how to be systematic.

He lacked the idea of building concepts upon many small elements, one upon another, and the idea that you cannot skip any of these steps.

But he found out all that, and wrote an excellent book about how to teach elementary math.

...and the other big surprise was that

• During his teaching career in the elementary school he actually learned a LOT of mathematics... not new facts, but subtleties: how that concepts we adults think are easy, are actually built upon other simpler concepts and notions, and how children need to be explained ALL those little steps.

For example, Aharoni learned that he couldn't just present first graders a question such as

"Donna has 4 pencils more than Joseph. How many pencils does Donna have, if Joseph has 5 pencils?"

He had skipped stages. Children couldn't do it. They needed first to learn the concept of there being a certain number more than another number.

You can read how he handled the lesson from that on, and many other things.

The last part of the book goes through all important concepts in elementary mathematics from grade 1 to grade 6, and explains these subtleties and little steps that you should teach.

I highly recommend this book. It costs $19.95, you can find it at www.sumizdat.org.

Please note, I'm not affiliated with this; I'm not getting a penny for promoting the book. I just truly feel that reading it is a MUST for each and every teacher and parent who's teaching elementary math.