Okay! herewith begins the Frequent Postings to This Blog. After one week of said entities, I shall delete this specific froth (leaving the postings) and then call attention to it.
Sometimes "how to do it" is more important than deep understanding, and sometimes it isn't.
When the process gets complicated, especially when it's something that you basically never never ever do in real life, then that gap between how the math teacher is thinking about the problem and how the student is thinking about the problem gets very, very wide - especially if the actual concept is fairly simple.
Take rounding.
Rounding is so obvious ... if it is obvious. The actual *process* is complicated. If students already grasp the concept, they tend to do well with the exercises.
Unfortunately, when somebody struggles with rounding, we (okay, I) tend to hone in on the procedure and add little steps to keep you going in the right direction. I am thinking that in this case, spending more time on the place value concept - with visuals, not words - might be in order.
If the student is still wrestling with what the right place valueis, that's taking up all the cognitive juice. Spend enough time mastering that! I shall search for some online exercises.
the nice thing about a blog is I cna plan and then get back to it and edit it. Peachi!
Then I suspect it's worth spending time with the "hill" metaphor and the zoomed in number line. THat should be purdy easy to do in Flash.
This is the kind of exercise you get a kiddo to mastery on... and then it's something you sneak back in periodically so it stays mastered.
more soon...