This free math tutoring video shows another way to do math in your head! This is my 6-year-old’s preferred method. She even came up with it on her own! Look through all my mental math videos, try out all the methods, and decide what your favorite is!
If you are teaching mental math to children, give them many problems of one type until they become proficient in that particular way of mental math. Then show them another way until they can do it in their heads – without manipulatives. Keep doing this until you have shown them all the methods or until they are quick enough with one method that they don’t need others. Let them choose which method they prefer. None is better than any other.
Most children can be taught mental math strategies once they have their facts to 10 memorized – somewhere between Kindergarten and 2nd grade. Mental math is an excellent way to build and ensure number sense!
This free math tutoring video shows an important concept to get down, especially for when it comes time to do long multiplication or division. Lots of practice in giving the “real” names for a certain number of tens or telling how many tens is in a number is essential for understanding more complex elementary school math.
Cuisenaire Rods help make the concept of place value, which is often very abstract for children, more concrete and understandable. They can visualize it. They can feel it. They can much more easily internalize the concept.
The activity in this free math tutoring video is good for developing mental math skills. Once the problems get bigger, children will be able to easily adapt this to larger numbers and add more quickly in their heads. Using the Cuisenaire Rods provides both a visual and tactile way to manipulate numbers instead of only relying on symbols. Young children, and children with dyslexia or dyscalculia often have difficulty fully understanding abstract symbols. Cuisenaire Rods help bridge the gap for them so that they can understand complex math concepts in spite of their learning difficulties.
