May 13, 2010 A

First of all, my apologies for waiting so long between posts. There always seemed to be something else more urgent to attend to.

Today I want to follow up on some of the topics I posted about before.

First of all, our class has completed our pilot of Dreambox. I am writing a report on our experience. (It is also in line behind many more urgent items.) The response from students has been mixed and my own impressions are also mixed. I will post the highlights of my report here when I have them written out.

Secondly, a group of Primary teachers at Gibsons Elementary have been working on a Learning Community Team project. We have been investigating the result of our teaching practice on the children's facility with mental Math. I'll report our findings here when we have them, too.

On Pro-D day, I shared our work with the rekenreks with the rest of our staff. There are many ways this tool can help children to build a mental image of a number.

While I was researching the development and the uses of a rekenrek, I came across the statement that when we speak of mental math, we are not talking about math in our heads, but math with our heads. This seems to me to be an important distinction. When we work with our heads, we are using clever and efficient means to solve problems. To do that, we have to understand numbers well enough to know which strategy is likely to work best at any given time.