This free math tutoring video extends the teaching from the last video, applying it to larger numbers. Once the numbers get too large to easily use Cuisenaire Rods, it is helpful to draw it instead. Children can use representative drawings for smaller problems, too, if they’d like, but some children (and adults!) will need lots of time touching real manipulatives before they are ready to move on to the drawing step and, finally, the symbols alone.
This free math tutoring video shows you how to introduce the traditional multiplication algorithm (or formula), but in a conceptual way using Cuisenaire Rods as manipulatives. The multiplication algorithm is usually not understood, even by teachers. This video will make clear what it’s all about.
This method will work for everyone, but it works especially well for visual and kinesthetic learners as well as those with dyscalculia/dyslexia, global thinkers, right-brained learners, and others for whom the traditional school approach does not work well.
Before teaching the algorithm, make sure your students have had plenty of practice doing these types of problems with just the rods and figuring them out in their heads! It will be a greater benefit to their future to build number sense that way first and then introduce the formal short-cut method.
This free math tutoring video shows my 6 and 8-year-old daughters figuring out the squares of numbers 10 through 20. We use a variety of strategies. This activity is helpful in building thinking skills and further developing number sense. They are beginning to see numbers as a picture in their minds that they will carry with them forever.
Square numbers are used frequently in higher math. If they come into contact with them enough now while they are young, they will have no trouble applying this knowledge later on in middle and high school.
