Thursday, October 8, 2009

Tutoring in the Language of Math

Math is fun. Or it can be if you do it right. Here is a 10 year old who orginally thought math "Sucked." Now he's trying to get me to get his Grandma to pay for lessons twice a week instead of just once a week. Imagine that.

In this lesson we fooled around with subtraction, addends, and algebra. All in one lesson, with simple easy transitions to each.

subtracton

Here we were making change for 100.00 using his new found knowledge of addends suddenly doing these problems was EASY and a snap. Note the notation...no crossing out nothing confusing just clean crisp answers...how do you do it? Make a 9, make a 9, make a 9, make a 10. SIMPLE

Go to my website for a lesson on subtraction. The page is not anywhere near finnished yet but it will give you more..find your way to my Myspace blog too.


algerbraic division with base ten blocks

Here we go directly into algebra, but you can see we were building the addends past ten, and that oddly enough since math is a language it all goes together and makes SENSE. The algebra he was doing was to cement the work he just did with addends AND to teach factoring...because factoring trinomials is just the clever use of addends and multiplication. An hour went by INSTANTLY. He was quite literally shocked when he realized it was time to go...

Follow the advice of P.T. Barnum "Always leave them wanting more..."

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