Where I post assorted thoughts and links relating to learning, specifically learning difficulties, learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia, "dyscalculia" and all the other reasons people struggle with numbers and math and arithmetic, reading, Orton-Gillingham stuff and ... whatever!

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

http://education.umn.edu/rationalnumberproject/

posted by SiouxGeonz at 3:08 PM

2 Comments:

Anonymous momof4dyslexicchildren said...

Hi Sue,
I think you're on the right track.. Place values understanding must certainly be in place before they can round. W/my boys we first learned "if it's five or more in changes higher if it's lower it stays the same." They parrot this EVERYTIME we do rounding. Next we lightly cross off the number in the place that we are rounding to. We started w/ the tens initially. W/ the number crossed off they know they are only interested in the guy(number) next door to the right. They follow the 5 or higher rule. First we did a couple that showed it moving to a higher number then we did the staying the same ones. Once they got pretty good we added the bigger numbers that keep the numbers to the left of the place we are rounding, and we addressed the changing the numbers to the right of the rounded place to zeros. We started with baby steps. I explained rounding to them as pretending to go into a store and they had x amount of money. We added a couple items like candy at 1.99 to see if we had enough to buy it. The candy was enough to keep them interested. Eventually it clicked.
Ps. This also works well for the older child learning % off...Pick something they like to buy. Tell them it's $50.00 regularly and is now 89% off and they only have $6.00. Can they buy it? My daughter answered of course not.. Till I let her work it first on the calulator. THEN I got her attention and could teach her %'s. Hope all this rambling helps.
Michelle

9:46 PM

 
Blogger SueJ said...

Great comment!
Yes - they need to understand... what I think a lot of teachers miss is they *also* need to do the parrot thing, *and* it helps to break things down into baby steps.

11:21 AM

 

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home