Perseverance and drive helped our son learn to read!!!
As a Math peak performance coach and the Mom of a dyslexic son, I can see the fruits of hard work and parental involvement. By the sweat of our brows, an awesome whole-language program (Al Dicker Reading program), an excellent reading teacher weekly and a parent/child half hour daily session for the past 15 months, our 9.5 year old son can now read. This afternoon, we finished Little House on the Prairie. Tomorrow brings On the Banks of Plum Creek.
Below are some comments from March regarding Nisbett's book from my Math Confidence blog:
Innate intelligence as measured by IQ can be increased
IQ is not the most important success factor
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Sixth grade homework can sometimes look like this: 5/12 divided by 5/9. I wish fractions problems would use easier numbers so that the student can feel if their answer makes sense. I like to use 12 divided by 1/2 or perhaps the more difficult problem used by Liping Ma and/or Deborah Ball : 1 3/4 divided by 1/2.
Students can build intuition by asking themselves if the answer would be more than 1 or less than 1 by using 3/12 or 12/3 and seeing which of these examples their problem resembles.
These fraction problems are usually also related to attention to detail and reading. One of the other problems was you have 12 yards of fabric and will use 2/3 of a yard for each item -- how many items can you make? The student will often perform the multiplication of12 x 2/3 without asking themselves the question: Can I make more than 12 items or less? Once they have answered that questions, then they have a more clear sense of what to do. 1/2 vs. 2 can be used here.
1/2 x 1/2 is a great example as students often add instead of multiply and do not feel that multiplication should make their answer smaller!!
For division of fractions, why do we invert and multiply? If the student just memorizes the procedure, they will not know which procedure to use. It might (definite maybe) be ok if students were able to memorize these concepts and procedures but they get all jumbled!! Students will better comprehend the material and have the ability to more accurately retrieve it if they rely upon examples rather than memorizing procedures.
Students can build intuition by asking themselves if the answer would be more than 1 or less than 1 by using 3/12 or 12/3 and seeing which of these examples their problem resembles.
These fraction problems are usually also related to attention to detail and reading. One of the other problems was you have 12 yards of fabric and will use 2/3 of a yard for each item -- how many items can you make? The student will often perform the multiplication of12 x 2/3 without asking themselves the question: Can I make more than 12 items or less? Once they have answered that questions, then they have a more clear sense of what to do. 1/2 vs. 2 can be used here.
1/2 x 1/2 is a great example as students often add instead of multiply and do not feel that multiplication should make their answer smaller!!
For division of fractions, why do we invert and multiply? If the student just memorizes the procedure, they will not know which procedure to use. It might (definite maybe) be ok if students were able to memorize these concepts and procedures but they get all jumbled!! Students will better comprehend the material and have the ability to more accurately retrieve it if they rely upon examples rather than memorizing procedures.
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