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Bridging gaps
One of my biggest struggles in the math classroom are those kiddos who have gaps in their learning and concepts they haven’t consolidated from previous years. To go along with this struggle is having the time to meet their needs as well as everyone else in the room. I have students that can add/subtract 3 and 4-digit numbers BUT it is painful because regardless of the great strategies they might be using, they have to work so hard to know the basics. Every step for them is so tedious. So, they aren’t efficient and as a result they aren’t always consistently accurate. For example, a student understands that they can add 4-digit numbers by place value and then put everything together but they still need to stop and think about what 6 + 6 is to help them get 6 + 7 to help them get 60 + 70, etc.
I feel like part of the problem is our curriculum – way too much ‘stuff’ in there to complete. I wish more focus could be spent on Number Sense in the primary years.
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2 Replies
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This is my struggle too. I also really think we need a rethink of the curriculum to be very Number Sense and maybe Measurement (estimation) focused for sure in the primary grades. Maybe if teachers were able to work all year on those foundational strategies, there would be fewer gaps and students would be able to move on to higher order concepts more easily.
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This is one of my big struggles too. As a 6th grade teacher, in some of my students I see so many gaps. I have students come to me from all different elemetnary schools with skills all over the place. Some students can use long division to divide three digit numbers by two digit numbers. Others are unsure how to divide a two digit number by a one digit number using long division, in part because of not knowing their times tables. This is just one example, but I find that number talks and warm-up discussions can only help so much. It’s tough.
