Math Teachers Should Encourage Their Students to Count Using Their Fingers in Class - T... - 2 views
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This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.
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Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation
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Evidence from both behavioral and neuroscience studies shows that when people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they get better at doing so, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. The tasks we have developed for use in schools and homes (see below) are based on the training programs researchers use to improve finger-perception quality.
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Great article on the strategies and rethinking of them in Math class for younger grades
