Group items tagged

"We've combed and curated the Web to find collections of the best apps for students and for teaching and learning, specifically for Android-based tablets and smartphones. Following are hundreds of recommendations from respected sources:"

Why playing with algebraic and calculus concepts-rather than doing arithmetic drills-may be a better way to introduce children to math. Math curriculum specialist Maria Droujkova notes in the article that "Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture," Introducing mathematics that is open-ended and play oriented keeps kids engaged with it, instead of being turned off and feeling deficient.

"The students in Molly James's kindergarten classroom were tasked with creating a mathematical art gallery. They had each drawn a number and then searched for two types objects they could use to compose a visual number sentence - such as two rulers plus three scissors to equal five objects. After photographing and mounting their pictures on the wall in numerical order, the students sat on the floor with their sketchbooks and began to draw and talk. "I had expected them to learn something about number composition," James said, "but I didn't expect the remarkable observations they began to have about the photographs." For example, when one girl looked at a picture of two red scissors and three blue scissors (2+3=5), she noticed that the direction of the handles gave rise to a new number sentence: 4 scissors pointing left + 1 scissor pointing right = 5 scissors. James, who recently published a paper about creativity in the classroom, said moments like these remind her that "creativity is not fluff or an add-on, but is instead an essential part of what it means to be a mathematician."  In fact, she believes creativity is the key to helping her students become confident and skilled mathematical thinkers."

"The following TEDTalk by Rita Pierson reminds us of why we all got involved in teaching to begin with. While curriculum, assessment, and instructional design may be how you parse your thinking now, at one point it probably had more to do with content, curiosity, and relationships. In this talk, the 40-year veteran teacher reminds us that not only do relationships matters, sometimes they're all that matters."

"When Sasha Ariel Alston pursued her love for coding, she noticed there were never many girls ― especially girls of color ― pursuing it, too. That's why she decided to write a children's book to encourage girls to learn about coding and STEM fields at an early age.  Alston is a 19-year-old Pace University student getting a major in information systems and a minor in marketing. She spent two years writing Sasha Savvy Loves to Code, a kids' book about a 10-year-old who becomes interested in coding, just like Alston. "The purpose of the book is just to get girls interested in coding and to provide basic coding terms," she said."

We teach children about numbers, but how do people come to know what numbers are, given that they are abstract? There must be some process of learning that takes place. This paper explores this problem, offers several alternative accounts of what a number is, and argues that the concept of a number can be learned by learning to recognize the size of a set or collection of entities. Teachers call this subetizing