If you want to be a teacher that just teaches kids the steps and lets them copy you, then fine. You can pretty much count on your typical first grader, taking away the whole ten rod instead of trying to exchange it for ones and only take away part of it. And if they need to break apart the ten to subtract? Forget about it. That's something that takes a lot of experimenting with counting and grouping objects to understand. As a teacher, I can't just tell them 1 ten rod is the same as grabbing 10 and expect them to understand. And that's really, really, hard to master. Kids can't actually build their own group of ten, they just have to know that grabbing 1 ten rod is the same as grabbing 10. So, what's the big deal? Why don't base 10 blocks work?īecause they can't be manipulated and changed. We spent most of last year's math leadership class talking about our base 10 system and how important it is for kids to understand base 10 to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide successfully and with understanding. Because they couldn't use the base 10 blocks to help them solve math problems on their own.well, besides maybe 2 kids out of 25. And they totally got how many rods and cubes to use to build 2 digit numbers-even 3 digit numbers.īut, did they really understand our base 10 system? During our math mysteries time, my kids were super pumped to grab those shiny blue base 10 blocks and then used the ten rods to represent the friend that their math mystery was about, or even ed a ten rod to represent one of something, a tally mark, the number one.Īnd, yes, I spent a good 5-10 minutes every day working on breaking numbers apart into tens and ones with interactive base 10 blocks during Math Wall. You see, the problem was, my first graders were using the base 10 blocks for anything BUT math. "No math tool should ever do the thinking for the kids."Īnd it changed how I thought about math manipulatives.
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