Math Opportunities • Valuable Experiences • Innovative Teaching
MOVE IT with manipulatives! MOVE IT through the curriculum! MOVE IT in the 21st century!
MOVE IT Math lessons are …
√ Effective with virtually ALL elementary school children as evidenced by their energetic participation in them and their timely acquisition of the skills, concepts, and applications they are about.
√ Enjoyable to all children as evidenced by their requests to repeat them.
√ Child motivated, arising from past successes and driven by requests for “more, bigger, and harder.”
√ Intellectually challenging to foster cognitive growth.
√ Group-conscious to encourage social development.
√ Characterized by the use of counting techniques, low-stress algorithms, manipulatives, games, and activities.
√ Meaningful, based on figuring things out, not memorizing. Employs drill and practice to aid recall of something already understood, not to stick “somebody else’s mathematics“ “someone else's head.“
√ Patient, not pushy, realizing that some ideas may take months or even years to formulate fully.
√ Considerate, not worried about little things (like writing 3’s backward) but relying on experience and social convention to correct such things. Doesn't segregate by so-called ability grouping by ensuring that ALL children succeed.
√ Holistic, presenting mathematical topics in their entirety, the parts in relation to the whole.
√ Comprehensive, treating simultaneously a large number of mathematical topics and seeking meaning in other subjects such as art, science and social studies.
A major objective of MOVE IT! is self-confidence, to show children how smart they are, not how smart teachers are. Children know that teachers are smart. They need to know that they are smart. When a lesson begins with an “answer,” as, “This is how you multiply whole numbers,” it shows that the teacher is smart. When it begins with a question, as, “How could you get the answers you got with the base-ten blocks with just paper-and-pencil,” it allows children to show themselves that they are smart.
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