Mental math is an important part of today’s math curriculum, especially those that are implementing the Common Core. Even if this is not the way that you learned math when you were in school, I will promise you that it is extremely effective and REALLY makes sense once you get started with it.
Rather than writing everything out here, I am going to share a couple of videos that I created last year. They will give you a quick overview of some of the most effective strategies as well as a recommended order of teaching.
The first video explains Mental Math addition strategies:
This video explains Mental Math subtraction strategies:
I hope that these videos are useful to your mental math instruction!
to help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
How does it work? Players answer quiz questions, and for every correct answer the World Food Programme provides ten grains of rice to hungry people all over the world. Free Rice has several subjects from which to choose including English vocabulary, world geography, math, science, art and foreign languages. When my students get to home room in the mornings, they boot up those laptops and start saving the world. Any extra time at the end of class is met with my direction, “Play Free Rice. Save the world.” But a caveat – it can be addicting. I speak from personal experience!
Check out this short video from the World Food Programme website:
I personally loved the first idea given of beginning each class with a firm handshake, one-on-one interaction with each student, and a random pop quiz from previous material learned in class. One teacher uses these three things as the students’ “ticket” to enter the class for the day.
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