Here you will see students as young as 4 and 5 years old doing algebra and "advanced" math, without ever knowing it's supposed to be hard.
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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Continuing Down The Algebra Path

mortensen math algebra

Again this work was done by a 7 year old. The first two are familiar to him he did them with ease and the third one was new ad he had to do it all be himself. Zero help from me.

Then we went into a lesson about concept number two: the highest number we count to is NINE, we only count SAME kind, and the numbers just tell you how many; the places tell you what kind, in algebra the symbols (x, y, x2 etc.) tell you what kind the numbers tell you how many and again we can only count same kind. This also applies to fractions. Understanding the five concepts and making sure they understand how they relate to each part of the math is crucial.

mortensen math algebra

Now that we understand where we are and where we are going and why, a set of problems arranged by degree of difficulty is given. The point of this lesson is to go from drawing to symbols so that they can eventually go from symbols to drawing with ease. We want them to go back and forth easily. They have the ability to do this because the only skill they really need is the ability to count. Then we can re-inforce addends, simple multiplication, factoring and lastly factoring trinomials.

mortensen math algebra

Right now this child is getting comfortable with trinomials and when we move on to explain the distributive theory of multiplication as it applies to two binomials, it's going to be simple and OBVIOUS. Right now we are "just counting".

Earlier in the lesson we built all the addends to 18, and practiced the patterns for multiplication for 2, 3, 4 and 5 by counting as we built towers using the same blocks.

algebra, base 10 blocks

Again the time flew by and best of all we had FUN.

More Algebra on Crewton Ramone's House of Math website.

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1 comment:

  1. I'm confused... On page http://www.crewtonramoneshouseofmath.com/multiplicand-and-multiplier.html you say: it's multiplicand, multiplier, product. That sounds like what kind then how many, right?
    But here you say 14x. 14 is how many and x is what kind. Am i missing something?

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