Matt Christiansen

It’s hard to believe that 2018 is here, and we’re quickly approaching the 100th day of school. When I first started working with elementary school teachers, the concept of a 100 days celebration was foreign to me—it wasn’t something that we did in high school. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate this tradition and the mathematical opportunities it brings. In honor of 100 days of learning this school year, here are a few ideas for your 100th day activities. Try them out and let us know what you think!

Many years ago, I was introduced to the elements of early Reading instruction. With my background in math, I had a lot of learning to do, but I immediately saw the value in helping students build an understanding of phonics and phonemic awareness. Using hands-on tools like Unifix® CVC and Blends cubes can accelerate students’ understanding of these critical early reading skills. Together with the new Early Phonics and Phonics activity books, these resources allow students to make concrete connections to the words around them. I’ve selected just a couple of the 211 activities available in these two books to get you started with this resource. All these activities are designed to support small-group phonics instruction using the Unifix phonics cubes and Word-Building Cards.

Watching my children and students work with manipulatives, I can see how hands-on experiences with math concepts help build a solid foundation for future learning. Often, teachers and students struggle with the transition from concrete manipulatives to a representation of the concept. Web- or app-based “virtual” manipulatives help to make this transition easier, although many teachers struggle to find a place for these tools in the classroom. Hands-on manipulatives are an excellent tool on their own, and they are even more powerful when coupled with virtual manipulatives. To support the use of these virtual tools, Didax has developed more than a dozen free virtual resources, available on our website. If you need some help getting started, read on for some ideas!

When I was teaching in the high school, we taught a unit on rational expressions and equations. In simple terms a rational expression is a fraction that has numbers and variables in the numerator, denominator, or both. Because rational expressions behave a lot like fractions, I usually started this unit with a day or two of review of fractions to help students build confidence with this foundational concept. Every year, I was surprised how many students struggled with fraction concepts, and it was clear to me that we needed to do more to build their conceptual understanding in the early grades. Generally, we are doing better with this, using more and different models to help students really understand the relationships between the part and the whole and also between fractions. Number lines help build conceptual understanding of fraction relationships and area models are useful tools for both relationships and operations. Another tool that helps students build an understanding of both fraction relationships and operations are interlocking fraction circles. The short video below explains how these circles support students’ understanding of fractions.