We are, as a rule, skeptical of the promises of the EdTech world. When so many students (young students especially) need hands-on materials, why put them on screens? And why do so [...]
There’s a place for facts in math class. They end experiences. Think of a fact as a snapshot you take from the top of the mountain you just climbed. It reminds to of the [...]
We recently took on a massive overhaul of our summer/intervention curriculum. Seattle Public Schools wanted to use it for some number of students; this being the pandemic and [...]
There should be no doubt that racist ideas are bankrupt, and racist policy is unjust, that injustice toward any of us hurts all of us.
This video follows up on the previous blog post, on understanding multiplication. Put in the time now and get this foundational understanding laid right.
What does “solve 3 x 8” mean? There are actually two crucial pieces of information to parse for this to mean anything. “x” means “groups of” First off, the [...]
I posted a little while ago about the importance of representations in subtraction. Today, I’m sharing a followup video on how to extend that understanding of fractions to [...]
A teacher named Mark Esch emailed me recently to ask about using one of our classroom games, Horseshoes, in a movie he wanted to make. When he sent it to me, I was blown away. It’s fun, and does a great job explaining the game. But [...]
We’re in the final stretch of the Kickstarter campaign now! The last ten days will determine just how successful the campaign is. Keep spreading the word, and hopefully we’ll get to 4x of our campaign target, hit all the [...]
I recently committed to donate up to 1000 Tiny Polka Dot games if people could help us find good homes for them. Within four hours of a mass email going out, 359 people had filled [...]
In a recent blog post I talked about the importance of starting from where things make sense. This may be one of the best ways to help your kids with math at home. If you [...]
Meditation on the Distributive Property In other news, I’ve been thinking about the distributive property. It’s usually summarized algebraically as: a x (b + c) = (a x b) + (a x c) A more general formulation is the old [...]
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