How to Teach Arithmetic Facts Easily and Effectively - CANCELED
Dates: CANCELED
Location: LAPDA Meeting Space, Montpelier, VT
Time: 8:30 -3:30
Cost: $150 for members, $175 for nonmembers
Registration: http://www.lapdavt.org
Target Audience: Pre K- 5 Teachers, Special Educators, Math Specialists
Workshop Description:
Course Description:
The focus of this workshop is to:
• Learn the most effective ways of teaching number concepts
• Understand how dyslexia and dyscalculia affect number conceptualization and arithmetic facts
• Learn how to teach arithmetic facts easily and effectively
More specifically, we will focus on:
I. What is numbersense?
II. What is dyscalculia?
III. How does dyslexia and dyscalculia affect number sense?
IV. How to teach arithmetic Facts Effectively
In order to raise standards in mathematics for all children, but most importantly for the lowest achievers, and create more interest in mathematics, we need to improve our teaching practices. Our practices should reflect an understanding of children’s development of number concepts and number relationships. While mathematics instruction for very young children needs to be age-appropriate in format and content, it also needs to prepare children conceptually for the kinds of mathematics learning that is expected of them in future years. We need to challenge as well as to provide opportunities to develop their numerical thinking at deeper levels. Because English is an alphanumeric language, literacy and numeracy should go hand-in-hand. Representing, using, and applying mathematical symbols and sounds begin along with language symbols. There are enough parallels to claim similar patterns of development in literacy and numeracy skills.
In teaching numeracy skills, we need to explore the similarities and differences in strategies for the conceptualization of number and language.
Most parents read to their children, so the young child becomes familiar with the patterns of sounds, symbols, and usage of language. Early literacy experiences are immensely useful for the development of the child, not just linguistically but also intellectually and emotionally. Mathematics is also a language. It is the language of quantity and space. It develops in the same way as any other language—through exposure and interaction with others. Each parent should introduce the child to the language of quantity and space as soon as possible so that the child begins to negotiate the sizes/quantity and shapes in his/her environment.
Reading, though a complex skill, is culturally determined, and modern societies expect children to learn how to read. Reading calls for a variety of brain systems to perform tasks such as language, recognizing visual patterns, sequencing, spatial sense, and so on. Similarly, acquiring numeracy skills is also an expected cultural activity. Some of the same processes are called upon in learning number, doing arithmetic, and thinking mathematically. Deficits in acquiring literacy and numeracy skills have common as well as different origins and treatments. Deficits in similar underlying processes may affect mathematics learning. Although there are similarities in learning to read and doing number work, learning numbers and doing mathematics are also different from learning to read in important ways. Some unique abilities and systems are needed to learn number and its applications.
Number dominates our daily life. Understanding num¬ber and its manifestations such as quantity, counting, and numerical operations is a fundamental human skill. Humans have a natural tendency to classify and quantify objects and events around them. Number as a concept arises from a person's need to understand and express quantitative and spatial aspects of our world, and we have invented symbols to express these. Numbers and arithmetic are so essential to the human experience that children develop a basic sense of number and mathematical relations without explicit instruction as a part of their socialization process.
As students’ interests should determine the nature of the content of their reading, the development of numeracy skills should also reflect children’s early interests. Our strategies, materials, and content set the tone for the child to use reading as a means to navigate the world. Similarly, the way we teach early number concepts impacts students’ ways of thinking about mathematical concepts. Those attitudes and conceptual impressions about mathematics are important in the elementary school years and beyond.
Children growing up in literacy and numeracy rich environments where reading, writing, and recording daily events are encouraged begin to link meaning, number, and value to objects. There, children know such ideas as ‘one’ and ‘two’ are quantities of daily use and hundreds and thousands are large quantities or things. They also know that pound has something to do with substance and inch with length. They begin to represent quantity through action and pictures and attach spoken numbers to these representations.
About the Instructor
Mahesh Sharma is known for his groundbreaking work in mathematics education, he is an author, teacher and teacher-trainer, researcher, consultant to public and private schools, as well as a public lecturer. He is the Chief Editor of Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics, an international, interdisciplinary, research mathematics journal with readership in more than 70 countries, and the editor of the Math Notebook, a practical source of information for parents and teachers devoted to improving teaching and learning for all children.
