Making Math Accessible for All Students
I previously tackled the difference between the ” – ” symbol used to represent a negative and a subtraction problem. This post gets into multliplication through the context of buying a Wendy’s frosty. One comment to preface what is presented here. Negative numbers are abstract and challenging for many students. Multiplying by negatives is even …
Continue reading “Multiplication with Integers: a Meaning Making Approach”
Here is a link to a Jamboard for presenting the transformation (you click on the negative sign and rotate and slide it). Here is a link to a video showing how this transformation. This video addresses the underlying concept of the transformation by showing an IOU being cancelled.
This post presents a scaffolded and meaning making approach to exponents that are 0 or negatives. Handout The slide show below presents all 4 pages. The handout starts with an initiation to preview the prerequisites for what is presented in the lesson. It also introduces a chart that will be used for discovery. Page 2 …
Budgeting and explaining the act of overspending are complex topics to address. This post details an authentic experience for overspending, but in a safe setting. Background I have previously posted about a running bank balance, gift card balance, and a comprehensive set of budgeting activities. These are activities that simulate various aspects of budgeting. When …
Solving 2-step Equations is an escalation in terms of task demand. Starting in elementary school, they are exposed to math sentences in which there is a single operation. Now they are asked to choose a number to eliminate. This post provides details about a scaffolded handout. It addresses the choice of number to eliminate and …
Shopping is surprisingly more complex that we realize for many students who are working on life skills math. Staying within a spending limit is one issue. The concept of a running balance is another. In this post, I detail an activity in which a gift card in real life and ones in simulations are used …
For years over many settings from middle school to college I have witnessed students struggle to make sense out of inequalities like x < 4. Not only is the concept of an inequality of an inequality challenging, merely reading the symbol is problematic. This post shows an concept based approach to making sense of inequalities. …
I had an interesting discussion through a Facebook post recently regarding concepts vs skills. I want to share some information I have gathered regarding this topic. I do so, because there were a substantial number of teachers advocating for skill based learning. I hope to initiate some meaningful discussion. Below left is a photo of …
Here are images from a handout that serves as an introduction to piecewise functions. The focus is to develop conceptual understanding of piecewise before attempting to graph independently. The work is divided into chunks to reduce the level of task demand at a given time in the process. The first section has an application and …
This approach make a connection between the table and graph with the equation. The relevant, real life context helps students.
