CurricularGamePlayingPart2

About a month after Christopher and I began working with Saxon Math 6/5, he told me,

Multiplication and division are the big brothers,
and addition and subtraction are the little brothers.

Then he said,

And multiplication and division are cousins.


+ + +


This is a 9-year who, just 6 weeks earlier, had been flunking math.

Any way you slice it, that's conceptual knowledge. In just a few weeks he'd absorbed the idea that addition & subtraction, multiplication & division, are inverse operations, and that multiplication was repeated addition, while division can be seen as repeated subtraction.

I should add that Christopher doesn't consciously know that division can be described as repeated subtraction (I don't think). He probably couldn't put it into words, though he could tell you that multiplication is repeated addition. But a few weeks into Saxon he had intuited the relationship.

This is exactly the goal constructivist math programs have set for themselves: they are trying to help students connect the dots.

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, & division aren't Four Separate Things, as they were for me until I read and studied Saxon Math!

I haven't worked with a constructivist text.

But I know for a fact that Saxon gives children conceptual understanding.


Curricular Game Playing
Curricular Game Playing, part 2
number bonds vs. 4-fact families
Numicom Dominoes

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