Teaching homeschool math without fear or tears.

Starting Points: Building Story Problems

I was reading a blog post recently about how 90% of students dislike story problems. Parents ask me about this in email and it came up in my old Facebook group. What do we do about story problems and how

MATHCamp: Avoid The Brain Drain

Summer slide is real and from all accounts, pretty serious. The reading slides are fairly easily remedied, get yourself to the library and get some good books to read. But what about math? Who wants to

Teaching Fractions with Cuisenaire Rods

In this post I'm continuing my series on Gattegno's Mathematics Textbook 1 learning to Teach fractions with Cuisenaire rods. We're in chapter 4 and this post covers exercises 19-24, which focuses

Mastering Addition and Multiplication Concepts with Cuisenaire Rods

In this post, I am continuing the work on Gattegno's Textbook 1, chapter 4. We are partway through our study of the number 5. We've parked ourselves in the middle of a long section that is dealing with

Multiplication and Fractions Within The Number 5

We have reached the section on multiplication and fractions within the number 5 in Gattegno Mathematics Textbook 1. These topics are covered in exercises 11 – 39 of chapter 4, which is the largest

Number 4 and Number 5 Study

This post continues our study of Gattegno’s Mathematics Textbook 1, chapter 4, starting with exercise 5 where we begin the study of the number 4. If you’ve just stumbled upon my blog, you can

Structure, Cuisenaire and Gattegno

We are going to take a break from our scheduled post on Gattegno Mathematics Textbook 1 for a small detour into how Gattegno uses Cuisenaire Rods to assist a student with understanding the structure of

Chapter 3: Putting It All Together

Chapter 3 of Gattegno’s Mathematics curriculum has come to a close. If you are new to Gattegno or Cuisenaire Rods, you can find a growing list of resources here. If you would like to locate all the

Fractions: The Inverse of Multiplication

We are at the end of chapter 3 of Gattegno’s Textbook 1. I’m pretty excited about this section of the material. My oldest son struggled with fractions and we didn’t introduce them until

Category Archives for Multiplication/Division