Strategies for Teaching Math to Elementary Students

Using colorful, interactive materials is one strategy for teaching math to elementary school students.

Although the concepts of elementary school math are simple, the responsibilities of actually helping your students comprehend those concepts can be overwhelming to new teachers. To teach your students math, you will need to employ effective teaching strategies. These strategies can be used in all areas, such as teaching the fundamentals of arithmetic, using materials to solidify concepts and explaining the utility of calculators.

Number Basics

The basics of elementary school math are addition, multiplication and other operations. Assist your students in learning these basics by teaching students the importance of committing to memory addition and multiplication tables. Your focus should be on helping them understand how to derive these facts, not simply using addition and multiplication tables to compute problems. For example, ask students which of the relationships in the tables are easy and which are hard. Ask them why these are easy. The easy relations tend to be those that can be done on a student's fingers. Try removing these relations from the addition and multiplication tables to make these tables less taxing to memorize.

Interactive Materials

You can use interactive materials to illustrate mathematical concepts and relations. Using these materials helps students turn abstract concepts into concrete ones. Before using these materials in your classroom, set ground rules for these tools. Elementary students often will turn interactive materials for math into pure toys, so be sure students know to stay on task. The wide range of interactive materials available to teachers should allow you to teach any elementary mathematical concept. For example, by using colored blocks you can ask students to piece together shapes composed of certain fractions. You may instruct students to create a shape that has 1/4 yellow blocks, 1/4 green blocks and 1/2 blue blocks, for instance.

Handling Calculators

Calculators can be useful tools or detrimental vices, depending on how you use them in class. You should expect students to be able to compute simple problems in their head and be able to use a calculator when needed. The best way to decide when to use calculators is to use it in situations that are not simple calculations. For example, you can help elementary students develop a numerical understanding of repeated adding and patterns by repeated use of the "=" sign. In one activity, you can ask students to add 2 + 2 in their calculators. After students hit "=," ask them to hit "=" again to display 6. Ask them what happens when repeating this action. Try this with different numbers to help students enhance their pattern recognition.

Planning for Substitutes

One reason teachers fall behind schedule in math class is absences. You can avoid this problem by properly preparing for such a situation. It is best if you have a means to communicate with the substitute for your class so that she has the information needed to follow your schedule. Even if you have no such means, you can still prepare for an absence by creating a "For the Substitute" folder that outlines the class schedule and lesson plans for the semester. Put this folder in a place that will be obvious to the substitute.

References

• "So You Have to Teach Math?: Sound Advice for K-6 Teachers"; Burns and Silbey; 2000