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Receive FREE SHIPPING on orders over $99 placed on the Didax website and shipped within the contiguous US. No promo code is required to receive this offer.
The order total for free shipping is calculated after any discounts are applied. Orders containing Eureka Math Kits DO NOT qualify for free shipping.
Free shipping valid ONLY on orders placed on the Didax website shipped within the contiguous US. Our regular shipping policies applies to other orders.
Need new ideas? Looking for quick tips for teaching tricky concepts or organizing your math centers? Class Ideas is your go-to spot for inspiration, information and innovation and it’s an ideal way to stay current with the latest trends in math teaching and learning.
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Every year around this time, my family is getting ready for back-to-school night. Now that I have children in high school, junior high, and elementary school, it’s always fun to see how this event is handled at the different levels. When I was teaching high school, we were very structured, with parents moving from class to class as though on a regular schedule; I think we had each group for ten minutes, just long enough to quickly review the syllabus and policies and send them off to the next class. Regardless of the structure of back-to-school night at your school, there are a few things you can do to make the evening more engaging for students and their parents. A good place to start is having some manipulatives you’ll be using during the year out for parents to handle. Things like Unifix Cubes, Pattern Blocks, Ten-Frame Floor Mats and Fraction Tiles are always good choices.
Traditional dominoes have a variety of uses in the classroom. A simple internet search for “math domino games” yields thousands of ideas for using these tools to build number concepts. But eventually, the novelty wears off and they become more of a toy than a learning tool. But the matching aspect of dominoes lets us expand this teaching tool to domains beyond number.
The first time I ever saw a teacher using Unifix cubes in the classroom, it was not in an elementary school. I was coaching a middle school teacher who was introducing the concepts of mean, median, and mode to her students. They were using the cubes to “graph” the data and then find these measures of central tendency. Since then, I’ve seen Unifix cubes in classrooms at every grade level, used in a variety of ways to teach number sense, data, measurement, patterns, and an array of topics. They were never as useful a tool for Geometry… until now.
One of the things I really enjoyed about my Geometry classes in college was that they were very hands-on. We used a variety of manipulatives to explore geometric concepts, and the lessons have stayed with me for a long time now. I carried many of these ideas into the classroom when I started teaching, using ideas as simple as nets and tools like marshmallows and toothpicks. While these models are adequate for teaching the general ideas, they lack the consistency and formality that Geofix shapes offer.
My Preschool-age son likes to read with us, and one of the books in his “favorites” rotation teaches shapes and colors. On the page with the rhombus, I always use the term “rhombus” rather than “diamond,” which is what is printed in the book. While reading with his mother last week, she read the term on the page rather than substituting “rhombus.” My son quickly corrected her; he shared what his preschool teacher taught him: “Diamonds are shiny things in jewelry. That is a rhombus.”
When I was teaching high school, place value was a concept that just seemed to exist; it was inherent in everything I taught, yet received little attention. I simply took it for granted. As I transitioned to working with students and teachers in the elementary grades, I realized that this was a mistake because place value was a concept that many of my students probably never fully understood. Place value is far more than just ones, tens, and hundreds. To really understand the concept of place value, we need to understand the relationship between the places.
While on hall duty during my first year of teaching, I was surprised to see our math department chair leading her Calculus students to a large common area in the school. Curious, I checked in on them a few minutes after the class had started and found that they were plotting “points” by standing on a large coordinate grid mat on the floor. After watching the teacher use those mats over and over with students in Algebra 1 all the way through Calculus, I realized the value of this kinesthetic learning experience. Her students understood the concepts better, and were more engaged, because they were out of their seats and actively creating a life-sized visual model.
According to the American Statistical Association, "Effective prediction is essential to improving medicine; monitoring climate; providing sufficient, safe food supplies; and much more." To make educated predictions as adults, children need to understand probability -- and start learning about it at an early age. Prediction is an adult skill used in many professional fields, including science, medicine, finance, and insurance. Underlying prediction is the notion of probability: whether a given event is certain to happen, likely, unlikely, or impossible.
Success in school, the workplace, and society increasingly depends on our ability to comprehend informational text. Yet, despite current language arts standards, informational text often gets short shrift in primary grades classrooms. One study of 20 first-grade classrooms showed that nonfiction books constituted less than 10 percent of the classroom library and that students spent less than four minutes per day reading informational text. (Duke, 2000)
As an undergraduate education student, I was challenged to write my personal mission statement that would help me define myself as a teacher. I don't recall the entire statement, but I know that it included something along the lines of "helping students think critically about mathematics." Looking at this from an experienced perspective, I'm not convinced that I knew what critical thinking was, let alone how to help my students become critical thinkers. With time, I've come to understand that there is no one way to accomplish this task, but there are strategies we can implement that will help students develop these skills.
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