Hot Dog Math!

 Math is a more difficult subject to make interesting than reading, at least for most of my students. So I go online to find ideas for math pages that will at least prevent the math from being boring. Today, I did multiplication problems with a third grader that showed a picture for each problem. The image was a gumball machine and two large gumballs, all but one of which had a number in it. For example, the gumball machine might have a 12 in it, while one gumball would have a 3 in it. The student would need to determine what the missing number was to make the correct equation. Sometimes the machine would be empty, and there would be a number in each gumball, and toward the end of the worksheet, there was a number in the gumball machine but no numbers in the gumballs. They had to find out what two numbers, multiplied together, would equal the answer. It was a little bit tricky for him at first, but as there were three such problems, he caught on quickly and was able to do the last two with very little guidance. 

Next week when we meet, he will be doing "hot dog" multiplication, using different colored pencils to color-code the answers. There is another page to this, but I'm not sure we'll be doing it because it seems too advanced for him. 

Anyway, these types of pages at least show images instead of plain numbers on a page. I don't want to be a boring tutor. 😊





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Subbing at elementary schools!

Image
 In addition to being a tutor, I'm also a substitute paraeducator for elementary schools, and I've done it eight times now! I really enjoy it! The only thing that's difficult is navigating my way around the myriad of hallways. I've been a recess overseer, a lunch room overseer, and watched the kids while they were in line waiting for the buses to arrive. But the best part is when I get to work in the classrooms! For one teacher, I got the cardboard dividers off the shelf and set one on each desk, then made sure each desk had a sheet of notebook paper and a sheet of graphing paper and a pencil. This was all before the kids arrived. I've also done timed reading with different classes, one method being to see how many words a kindergartener can read in one minute, marking the words they read wrong, and another method where the kids in 1st grade had to read a one-page story and time them to see how long it took them, marking any words they mispronounced. I've done m...
Read more

Vowel Sounds

Image
My first post for April!  The six-year-old girl I've been working with has been learning to read blends and doing so well! Bl, tr, st, ch...  But she's started to get confused about what sounds the vowels make. So I've decided to take a break from her workbook and go back over the sounds of A,E,I,O,U. I have special lined paper in a book for young writers, and I wrote the vowels across the top of a two-page spread with lines representing columns. Then I would say a word with a vowel sound in it, like "cat," for example. Then she would need to recognize which vowel sound she was hearing, and write the word under the correct letter. (A)  I used some really easy words like bat, sit, had, dog, cup, etc. but I also included some of the newer words she's been learning, like play, trip, chug, and so on. She did okay, but she really had to think about the sounds. So I'm going to be working on the vowel sounds with her over the next couple of weeks (I tutor her onc...
Read more

#34

Image
 One of the boys that I tutor is on a little league baseball team, and I was able to go to one of his games! I enjoy support the kids that I tutor in this way, and it shows that I care about more than just what I can teach them, but I care about them personally as well.  At the baseball game, I took a photo of the team lined up before the game started, and I can mostly see their jersey numbers. Bryson is #34. Then I thought, how can I use this in a math problem? I decided to see what numbers he can figure out to multiply to get 34. Then I thought I could do that with the other teammates' numbers as well. I'll have to do more than just what I got in the picture, but that's a start! Oh, and they only lost the game by one point. So close!
Read more