Teaching the same concept in six or seven different ways seems unnecessarily involved when all the kids really need is a bucket of Cuisenaire rods.
But you need all six mothods to make sure all the kids in the class get it. What if the one method they chose made no sense to you at all? [/quote]
I expect that the other methods I looked at don't make much sense. I admit I could have described them!
One of the regrouping ones I mentioned but didn't describe was like this:
A picture showed 28 + 16 as two sets of ten blue blocks and 8 green one blocks for 28 and the same idea for 16. Then they regrouped the tens in groups of five and recolored stuff: two blue tens, 14 multicolored ones in two groups of five and one of four, and one ten. A subsequent step showed everything in blue again as tens, except they showed three tens and six ones as the answer.
I'm going to stand by my original idea that a lot of this stuff is unnecessarily confusing and that Cuisenaire rods demonstrate the concept much more effectively than a lot of other presentations. Arithmetic is straightforward, and the explanations about it should be too.
My eldest son's first school used
Everyday Mathematics and he used to complain about how much he hated it, that a lot of the exercises were too confusing, and that adding was much easier.
Sometimes it's hard to tell fads from good stuff.
Val
