"New" Math

"What is with this new math I keep hearing about?"

"Why can't our kids just learn the same way we learned math?"

"I dropped something off at little Jakey's class today, and you should have seen his class! The kids were all over the place, talking and doing things with toys. Apparently, they were doing math! Seemed like chaos to me! Bring me back to the time when we all sat quietly and did our own work!"

Unfortunately, the comments above flood through daily conversation without those who are making them understanding the benefits of what some might call the "New Math."

This math isn't exactly new, what's new, is the idea that we put the learning into the hands of our students rather than expect our students to learn through us talking about what they should be doing and knowing, and then expecting them to know and do exactly that.

azquotes.com

So, why make a big deal about how to plan for this new fangled math then? If the kids are just doing it themselves, we can just throw out some random idea from the internet and be on to something else then... right?

WRONG!

We know that through every step of planning there is a lot of preparation and time, and sometimes we find out that what we have done still isn't going to get us there. If we go in with the knowledge of what it takes to make our students successful math students, then at least we have our grounding to get things going - but we still need to make sure that the prior learning is there, and that what we are doing flows from one big idea to the next.

Think about it like a dominoes track. If our starting domino isn't set up correctly, nothing will happen. All that planning and work to get the rest of the dominoes set up will have been for nothing.
If we get that first one right, and carefully plan the rest down the line, we can add in some neat tricks and other ideas, while getting to that big picture at the end. And our hope, is that by the end, our students have learned what we need them to know to get to that next big picture!

Check out my blog for lots of ideas on planning for your primary and junior math classes!