elementary (k-6th) Articles

Although one of my specialties is foreign languages, I have experience in working with Elementary students in applying phonics and comprehension techniques to relieve a young student's anxiety and build their confidence.

If you have younger children, no doubt they are required to read at school. But if your child has trouble reading or dislikes reading, maybe it’s time to find another strategy for how they read at home.

You may have heard about how parents have their children read with their pets at home. This is an excellent way for your child to get comfortable reading out loud. If your child doesn’t have any pets he or she can read to, try having them read to their stuffed animals, or toys (such as dolls or action figures). Reading out loud at home can really help when they are in the classroom.

If you can, put aside some time in the evenings to have your child read to you and your family! Maybe it’s a quick news article or a bedtime story. Either way, your child is practicing public speaking as well as their reading skills! When you are together as a family, listening to your child read, grab a few of their reading friends (such as pets, or toys) and make it a comfortable setting, not a grand performance on a stage.

You may even decide later to help them or enroll them into a storytelling class. This is a fun way to practice public speaking, reading skills, and memorization skills as well.

From counting to Calculus. Math is NOT difficult (no I'm not being arrogant). Tell me what you have difficulty in and I'll immediately tell you how to fix it.

Come on PROVE me wrong!

I've noticed an interesting parallel between ADD and what happens when one teacher has to work with too many students at once. The system itself has ADD! Too much to keep track of, too much evaluation pressure, similar mistakes. Where a student with ADD would make errors on homework or leave it unfinished, a teacher with too many students will miss signals from kids about what they do and don't understand, and will leave much of the education of students unfinished. Same sense of frustration, same fear of judgment and blame.

Maybe we need to re-evaluate factory schooling and look at new ways to connect students to mentors who can adjust to individual learning styles. The great irony of this is that we really need skilled workers who can think critically and solve problems creatively, but we're trying to standardize and make everyone into a worker ant with only obedience and autistic focus on details in their skillsets. China and India will always do better at that. We need to be more dynamic in the US, and not imitate what works in more homogenized cultures.

Let us find 224 divided by 3. This basically means that we want to separate 224 into 3 EQUAL groups. Our quotient will tell us how many goes into each group.

Now, forget about math for a moment. How would you do this without math? Say you had a bucket of Lego pieces, and you wanted to put them (for some crazy reason) into three smaller buckets, each with the same number of pieces. How would you go about doing this without math?

I would take out three pieces and put one into each group. Then I would take out three more pieces and put one in each group. I would continue this until I had used all the pieces. This is EXACTLY how long division works, with one exception: because of place value, our job is made easier, and a bit harder conceptually. We have the constriction (and the advantage) of having to group our pieces into hundreds, tens, and ones (i.e., groups of one hundred pieces, groups of ten pieces, and groups of one piece).

Look at the empty groups above and imagine that, instead of 224, you had 3 hundreds and 3 ones. You would not waste your time separating this amount into 303 little pieces and putting one piece into each group until the pieces were gone. You would see that you could put 1 hundred and 1 one in each group. So grouping the pieces into chunks larger than one, using place value for example, can be helpful.

We cannot divide 2 hundreds into 3 groups and leave any of the hundreds intact, so we start by breaking up the hundreds into tens.

When we separate those 22 tens into 3 groups, we get 7 tens (70) in each group and 1 ten (and 4 ones) left over.

You can see it right there in the algorithm. If we guess 8 tens in each group, we have used more than we were allotted from the beginning, so we put 7 in the quotient. This means we use 3 times 7, or 21, of the tens, and we have 22 minus 21, or 1, ten left over.

Again, we cannot leave the tens intact and divide, so we have to break up the 1 ten into 10 ones. This gives us 14 ones.

Now we can do the piece by piece counting. Notice though that one only has to count out 14 pieces instead of 224 pieces. And, of course with mathematics, we do not have to count out anything.

We put 4 ones in each group, which means we use 3 times 4, or 12, ones, and we have 14 minus 12, or 2, ones left over. We can either call this R2, or we can split each of the leftover ones into thirds and place two thirds into each group.