Summer Restructuring and Reorganizing

I spent a great deal of time this summer composing
lessons for the Smartboard which relate to using
mental mathematics strategies. Will they be successful
for teaching children different strategies?

I have been using a few of them to do assessments
of my students to guage their skills. My observations
show me that quick adding using visual representations
like dots or ten-frames is sucessful for most, but
many will recognize one number (ie 5) and then
count on the others, some will see numbers and
quickly add, few will look for groups of ten.

We are at the time of year when we really work
this idea of mental math starting with two
digit numbers. I'm disappointed that all of the
'review' work that we did with basic facts has
still left many children counting rather
than knowing the answers. I've observed that
this is extremely deliterious for some students
because they haven't developed any number sense at all!!!
Not even a simple understanding like conservation
of number!!! (YIKES) However, it has made many students
faster with this skill (of counting on or back), which is
good.

More school next week.