Hot . . . Cold
Wet . . . Dry
New . . . Old
Open . . . Shut
Children can grasp the idea of opposites at a young age. If you take advantage of this concept when teaching math, it cuts your work in half!
Instead of teaching subtraction, teach “opposite addition”. If you know that 3 + 5 = 8, then you can do the opposite. When you see this problem: 8 – 5 =___, just make it into a backwards addition problem. Start at the opposite end (the back) and add this way: what number plus 5 equals 8 ?
My grandson Isaac
My 11-year-old boy is still trying to memorize his times tables. He’s finally gotten his 5’s and 9’s (and of course 0’s, 1’s and 2’s) but the rest seem to be hard for him. I’m wondering what we can do without spending much. [Read more…]
Mastering the math facts is one of the journeys and victories of childhood. The sooner they are learned to the “automatic-response” stage, the better! All math that follows requires the basic addition and mulitiplication facts. One mathematics professor at the university said that most of the problems his Calculus students misssed on tests were due to math fact errors, not because they didn’t know the formulas!
Here is an easy way to teach your children how to remember the “greater than” and “less than” symbols in their Math lesson!
First, draw one of the symbols, like this:
Now, make that symbol into a big fish’s mouth like this:
The fish has a BIG mouth that loves to eat the most he can get: the largest numbers. So the big, open part of the mouth always faces the largest number.
One day when Louisa was nearly 3 years old, I told her to shut the door and she answered, “In a minute!”. I wanted her to learn cheerful and prompt obedience. I tried to explain that to her, and I made sure she shut the door, but I wondered if she really understood that “in […]
