Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Speed Bump

Lesson 4 of Math-U-See was rounding and estimation. Per usual, Jory and I watched the video once, twice, and I thought life was good until…I took a closer look at his math worksheets and noticed that things were skipped and one sheet had writing on it but it wasn’t his.

I sat him down with some paper and we went off rounding up and down and we hit a brick wall. Jory wasn’t getting it. Poor baby. He was guessing which gives him a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

I took out my teacher’s manual and read. I tried to use the exact wording in the book, the little tricks they use, and nothing. I was getting frustrated. I was concerned that I wasn’t explaining it in a way that he could understand. I put aside my own thoughts cause I was thinking, this seems very easy, but I’m no longer six. I thought it was odd that lesson four was rounding. Was that what first graders were learning now-a-days?

Here was the problem while Jory could count by tens, he couldn’t say the multiples of ten that were closest to a number. So if I said, what two multiples of ten are closest to 38. He would start guessing. 40, 50, 20. But I could tell he wasn’t sure he was just throwing out answers.

His daycare worker helpful wrote out a number line from zero to nine and drew a line between 4 and 5, so he could see what number meant you should round up or round down. And sometimes this worked, he knew when to round up or down, he just had no idea what number to round up or down to.

I finally decided it was time to send out a distress signal to my nearest and dearest, before sending out a full blown SOS. I didn’t want to have this conversation anymore…

“Jory, do you understand?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

What a great group of awesome women I have in my life. They responded back and I knew on Tuesday night, I’d take their suggestions and see if their wording could shine a light in the fog.

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