Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School What is 2nd grade math, anyway?

yes yes yes! This sounds so bizarre to me that I can't even take it on faith, but the curriculum does say they add one extra place per year for several years. IIRC it went to fourth or fifth grade or something insane like that ( I think the highest mentioned was 10,000, which would be fifth grade, but maybe they got ambitious and made them learn two spots in one year). A couple of teachers have claimed this, too.

But, I just don't believe it. Once you understand the differences between 1,10, 100, then if you can't extrapolate to 1000 and into infinity then you don't really understand the difference between 10 and 100. They must not be teaching it well enough.

ETA: I checked up, and second grade goes to hundreds, third grade go all the way to 10,000, fourth to a million. BUT, the second grade standard says they need to be able to do ordinals up to 20, which clearly isn't some watershed the way adding single vs double digits is, so these standards are obviously formulated as the floor for kids who do not understand at all and need to rote memorise it all. And they could just not have the space to add in memorising that fifty-second equals number 52 in line instead of understanding the pattern.

This is accurate in my experience, although DD also began to accelerate in 2nd grade math, so we added in some other stuff. Definitely time, money, and regrouping with two-digit numbers in addition and subtraction. DD also did a lot of fact memorization in second. I actually thought 2nd was an important year, after a wasted year in 1st, but we also switched schools and curricula that year.

We didn't experience this thing with adding a place value every year. DD did place value up to the millions in second.

What also makes me think this is how much of the curriculum is measurement stuff -- time, money, temperature, weight, etc. Sure, this is important stuff to know in life, but it is in no way a building block of further math progress. They could just as easily pull it out as a separate subject, and let math go on its merry way. So stuffing all this into 2nd grade really does seem like a way to keep the math curriculum in a holding pattern until kids have matured a little.

What I remember from my own childhood is that they made it "harder" by giving bigger and bigger problems with endlessly dull computation, like "259,384 + 513,628." This is not conceptually any more difficult than simpler place-value and carrying problems, but it requires a heck of a lot more patience and attention and executive control. Hence, older kids are ready for it, younger kids aren't. QED.

I think the current pedagogical philosophy is that all that measuring makes math more concrete for everyone-- that it's developmentally important.

Some kids are ready for more abstract algorithms much earlier than others, of course.

I agree with using measurement problems as a tool for teaching arithmetic. I'm all in favor of making things concrete. That's different from taking time out of the curriculum to memorize combinations of coins, or the crazy imperial measurement system used in the U.S.

The measurement, and money is another way to make them practice addition and subtraction, make "math" relevant. It also makes math visual for those kids who don't really get the concepts easily. I see why it's part of the curriculum, and for the some kids pace this is useful. It's just really frustrating for the kids who just "get" it, who don't need this level of repetition. What drove me nuts was how much time was spend on "patterns" in K and 1st grade.

It's frustrating but many elementary teachers aren't very comfortable with math and just teach to the book not really understanding the concepts themselves. If their degree is in elementary education they might not have ever taken math higher than Algebra II.

What do you mean?

Joke.