Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 79. Today I’m asking, How Can I Help?
You may or may not have noticed but I took a break from doing these podcasts. I can blame the craziness of 2020 and navigating this time with 4 young kids but really the reason I wasn’t creating this podcast was because I didn’t think I could be of any help.
This year is insane and I really didn’t know how to help you. I’m not teaching in a school and so helping you navigate everything you are going through was not something I could help with.
Recently, I’ve been getting emails and notes from educators who are inside my online course The Flexibility Formula and I’ve realized that what I do help educators with is understanding the foundation of mathematics and how kids build that understanding.
Yes, how you do that right now may look different but the mathematical understandings we need to help kids build hasn’t changed. So even though I may not be able to help you navigate the crazy world of educating kids right now, I can give you information about ensuring kids are building a solid foundation of mathematical understanding that will help them become flexible thinkers with math.
How you implement that will look different based upon your specific situation, but it’s important we know the foundation of how kids build their mathematical understanding. As we get started with 2021, I wanted to restart this podcast with that in mind. No matter if you are teaching face-to-face or virtual, I know you are here and listening to this podcast because it’s important to you that you are building your students’ math minds and not just creating calculators. So each Sunday, I’ll be here with something to help you on that journey.
So thank you for being a dedicated listener of the Build Math Minds podcast and I’m excited to be back.
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Hi Christina,
Here’s how you can help me to help others and maybe yourself:
I’m a retired, almost 82 year old, math teacher who was inspired 45 years ago by Mary Laycock, Peter Rasmussen, and several other leaders, to use math manipulatives to help kids build their math minds.
Like you, I didn’t have a math mind when I was in elementary school. (I started understanding math in junior high.) It wasn’t until I got an undergrad degree at the University of Michigan in 1961 (after Sputnik) with a double major, one in psychology and one in math education, that I understood what a math mind is. My math ed training was under Dr. Phillip Jones who was the president of the NCTM so I learned all the New Math stuff as an undergrad. But, I had a secondary credential so I didn’t teach math at the elementary school level as you did. I wish I had. I taught Jr. high, high school, and D.E. math at several colleges. I also got a masters degree in math ed. under another NCTM president, Dr. Harold Fawcett.
But then, 2 workshops, one with Mary L. and one with Peter R., taught me about math manipulatives. From their inspiration I invented my first Path to Math™ Kit of math Tiles. With my math Tiles you can do activities and play games of addition, subtraction, multiplication & division with whole numbers, fractions, decimals and %.
My manipulatives are better than other sets of base 10 materials because I have 1, 10, and 100 Tiles in the primary colors and 5, 25 and 50 Tiles in the secondary colors. (Our money system has coins and paper money with these same values, and my Tiles are proportional, unlike money, so my Tiles make math make sense.)
I made the original Kits out of Masonite® because Peter R. made his original Algebra Tiles™ out of Masonite®. Unfortunately, Masonite® is not die cuttable so I’ve made the Tiles out of 3 mm colored die-cuttable foam and 3 mm colored foam on die-cuttable magnetic sheeting. Both work great. The unit is 0.5 inch. The foam version of 20 games of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of whole numbers won an educational toy award from Dr. Toy.
I’m trying to get someone, like you, who understands the importance of number sense and place value, etc. to help me publish my stuff. (As you know, it doesn’t matter how good something is. It has to be marketed and that’s the part you’ve learned to do really well!)
I’ve also invented Visual Math™ Number Pictures Playing Cards with pictures of the numbers from 1 to 20 “built” out of pictures of the one, five and ten Tiles. Kids can play addition and subtraction games with these cards as they practice math concepts in a fun way. The Visual Math™ Number Pictures help kids remember the addition and subtraction facts by strategies.
If you have any interest in any of this, please let me know and I will mail you a deck of my Visual Math Number™ Pictures Playing Cards so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about. Let me know what address you want me to mail the cards to or if you have any other ideas.
Siva Heiman
edutainer
372 Virginia Ave.
San Mateo, CA 94402-2262
home phone: 650-FIT-MATH = 650-348-6284
cell 650-678-2615
Hi Christina,
Here’s how you can help me to help others and maybe yourself:
I’m a retired, almost 82 year old, math teacher who was inspired 45 years ago by Mary Laycock, Peter Rasmussen, and several other leaders, to use math manipulatives to help kids build their math minds.
Like you, I didn’t have a math mind when I was in elementary school. (I started understanding math in junior high.) It wasn’t until I got an undergrad degree at the University of Michigan in 1961 (after Sputnik) with a double major, one in psychology and one in math education, that I understood what a math mind is. My math ed training was under Dr. Phillip Jones who was the president of the NCTM so I learned all the New Math stuff as an undergrad. But, I had a secondary credential so I didn’t teach math at the elementary school level as you did. I wish I had. I taught Jr. high, high school, and D.E. math at several colleges. I also got a masters degree in math ed. under another NCTM president, Dr. Harold Fawcett.
But then, 2 workshops, one with Mary L. and one with Peter R., taught me about math manipulatives. From their inspiration I invented my first Path to Math™ Kit of math Tiles. With my math Tiles you can do activities and play games of addition, subtraction, multiplication & division with whole numbers, fractions, decimals and %.
My manipulatives are better than other sets of base 10 materials because I have 1, 10, and 100 Tiles in the primary colors and 5, 25 and 50 Tiles in the secondary colors. (Our money system has coins and paper money with these same values, and my Tiles are proportional, unlike money, so my Tiles make math make sense.)
I made the original Kits out of Masonite® because Peter R. made his original Algebra Tiles™ out of Masonite®. Unfortunately, Masonite® is not die cuttable so I’ve made the Tiles out of 3 mm colored die-cuttable foam and 3 mm colored foam on die-cuttable magnetic sheeting. Both work great. The unit is 0.5 inch. The foam version of 20 games of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of whole numbers won an educational toy award from Dr. Toy.
I’m trying to get someone, like you, who understands the importance of number sense and place value, etc. to help me publish my stuff. (As you know, it doesn’t matter how good something is. It has to be marketed and that’s the part you’ve learned to do really well!)
I’ve also invented Visual Math™ Number Pictures Playing Cards with pictures of the numbers from 1 to 20 “built” out of pictures of the one, five and ten Tiles. Kids can play addition and subtraction games with these cards as they practice math concepts in a fun way. The Visual Math™ Number Pictures help kids remember the addition and subtraction facts by strategies.
If you have any interest in any of this, please let me know and I will mail you a deck of my Visual Math Number™ Pictures Playing Cards so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about. Let me know what address you want me to mail the cards to or if you have any other ideas.
Siva Heiman
edutainer
372 Virginia Ave.
San Mateo, CA 94402-2262
home phone: 650-FIT-MATH = 650-348-6284
cell 650-678-2615
Hi Christina,
I’m wondering why when you talk about fact strategies you talk about addition and multiplication? Why do you not put the same emphasis on subtraction and division?
I teach upper elementary and find that most students struggle with subtraction of which I believe comes from not really understanding it in the earlier grades. What are your thoughts?
Michelle, great question. I’ll do a video about it, but kids need to get addition & multiplication solid because all subtraction problems can be solved as addition (13-5 really is 5 + ? = 13) and all division problems we really do think multiplication (48 divided by 8 we think to ourselves 8 x ? will give us 48…and as they get into long division all you are doing is multiplication). So we need to spend more time laying that solid foundation and fluency with addition & multiplication and along the way building the connections between those and subtraction & division.