Saturday

 Flowers ...

Chalk Art Festival

This week, every time I walked into my building to teach this week, I walked around amazing chalk drawings. Here are a few.

This week was a really good teaching week - I felt like my students were engaged and learning (we did an activity learning about histograms in one class and number systems in the other). Maybe it was walking by pretty pictures right before I taught that provided me with teaching inspiration :)

(favorite ^)

(2nd favorite. Don't remember what it's supposed to be, but I think the colors are pretty)

Why Learning Multiplication is Hard

I've been reading and writing a lot this week (as I do every week) and found and interesting analogy explaining why learning multiplication is hard.

Consider memorizing the following names and streets:

Carl Dennis lives on Allen Brian Ave.

Carl Gary lives on Brian Allen Ave

Gary Edward lives on Carl Edward Ave

Now, instead of using names and streets, replace "lives on" with equals, Carl with 3, Dennis with 4, Allen with 1, Brian with 2, Gary with 7, and Edward with 5. And if your pretend that I didn't color code the words and numbers, well, this would be similarly difficult to memorizing:

3 x 4 = 12

3 x 7 = 21

7 x 5 = 35

btw, this doesn't mean that learning multiplication is hopeless... just means that the child needs to (1) practice and (2) understand what it means - that 3x4 means you have three bags with 4 cookies, and an answer of 21 doesn't make sense (too big)