November 2, 2014

Multiply and Divide, Big and Small - NCCTM14

Last week I had the honor of presenting at the NC Council for Mathematics Teachers Conference.
My goal was to work on strategies for teaching multiplication and division with whole numbers, decimals, and fractions.

Read that list again.

It was clearly too much. So - I opted to have my fabulous participants vote on which areas were their strongest needs and we started there. We ended up doing the top two needs: fractions and whole numbers. The group ranked decimals as their least need, which really surprised me!

I promised my participants that I would post the presentation here. Please note - I hate presentations with lots of words on them, where the speaker is just reading off of the slides. Therefore, my slides mostly have problems on them, not explanations. The explanations come from group discussion. You'll have to figure out the words for yourself =)




Here is the Division with Fractions handout that we worked on. I use this before doing any instruction in division with fractions. When students complete these tasks, I emphasize the importance of reasoning. We can solve these division problems without any algorithms!




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