meaning
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Introduction to Inequalities
For students with special needs, the teacher speaking “math” to students sounds like the teacher from the Peanuts cartoons. This is apparently the case when students are learning about inequalities such as x < 4 because I have seen many high school and college students struggle with this topic. The challenge is that teachers are…
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Intro to Graphing Inequalities
For years over many settings from middle school to college I have witnessed students struggle to make sense out of inequalities like x < 4. Not only is the concept of an inequality of an inequality challenging, merely reading the symbol is problematic. This post shows an concept based approach to making sense of inequalities.…
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Math is a Language
The Gutenberg printing press was revolutionary because it provided a faster way to share words. In turn, these words and how they were structured were representations of ideas used to make sense of the world around us. Math is a language with words and other symbols that also makes sense of the world around us.…
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Webinar on Making Math Meaningful (Specifically for students with autism)
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Making Discount Meaningful
Educators teaching math typically start with the “mathy” stuff first. For example, for finding the sales price teachers may start with showing students the steps to calculate (photo below). I start with the concept, either with a pictorial representation or actual objects to represent the underlying concept. In the photo above, I show an object (related to…
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Conceptual Understanding Before Getting “Mathy”
All too often math topics are introduced first with the skills and steps. This is backwards. The photo above shows how I introduced solving equations a high school student with autism using the concept as an entry point. We discussed what was involved in buying a car, including payments (no interest) then I posed the…
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Analogies: Making Math Meaningful
Math is an esoteric subject for most people. Good instruction makes information meaningful. One method for making information meaningful is to connect new information to prior experience. In this situation the new information involves determining whether shapes are similar (see photo below). One example of student prior experience with this topic would be shrinking people…
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Equation with variable on both sides scaffolded
Solving equations with a variable on both sides proves to be exceedingly tricky for many students. My approach is to focus on the individual expressions taken from both sides of the equation and to present them in the context of a relevant real life situation. The photo shows a snippet of the handout I…
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Memory
One model for memory is called the Information Processing Model or Dual Storage Model. Here’s the suggested process in this model in a class instruction context: Our senses receive stimuli. In the classroom students hear the teacher or a classmate talking, see the teacher’s notes or the note being passed to them, smell various things…