Use Math manipulatives hiding in Junk Drawer For Teaching Math Effectively | Improved Mathematics Teaching Tips for parents and teachers

Math manipulatives are a fundamental teaching method for young students. 

The teacher already has this secret, who is professionally into teaching early childhood students. Math manipulatives are items that students can just not only be used in the classroom but at their home too. Math manipulatives provide a hands-on opportunity for youngsters to comprehend topics. To properly engage kids in the classroom, teachers should understand how to employ manipulatives. To demonstrate complex mathematical topics, you may create a variety of exercises utilizing actual manipulatives. To maximize efficiency, teachers must pick all manipulatives with care and precision, and pay specific attention to the order in which they are introduced.

 Using hands-on materials as part of math training helps youngsters understand math concepts and methods. They’re an excellent approach to help students understand when mathematical topics get more complicated.

How do Math Manipulatives work?

There is sufficient evidence to suggest that employing manipulatives for lengthy periods of time improves kids’ learning processes.

Manipulatives are especially seen as absolutely beneficial to visual and kinesthetic learners, but they may help any student acquire new math concepts.

  • They make arithmetic more visible, which benefits both teachers who are showing a skill and students who are learning it. 
  • They also make arithmetic more enjoyable.
  • These manipulatives provide a learning experience that is not limited to the textbooks
  • Make students abstract ideas to the concrete form.
  • Build-in more confidence in the students 
  • Math seems fun, exciting, and an interesting part to the students.

But this shouldn’t demand a panic among parents and teachers, to rush and grab all the cheap and pricey stuff from the market. You most likely have a number of daily products at home that will be ideal for remote learning. Prepare to go through your trash drawer, kitchen pantry, toy shelves, waste bags, classroom drawers, etc.

The present educators can utilize these manipulatives to show math so that understudies can undoubtedly get dynamic numerical ideas. 

Here are the manipulatives teachers can get the most benefit from for evolving their math teaching process. 

  • Coins: The currency coins and notes are simply a wonderful way to learn about a variety of mathematical topics, including decimals and place value. Money is an important math manipulator since each coin and note has a specific value associated with it. 

Other topics such as addition, multiplication, percentage, and division can also be taught using dollar bills and coins. The usage of coins excites young students. I am sure you can relate to this, think like a student first. How we used to get so much joy seeing the coins and touching, and playing with them making piles, spinning, rolling them all day long. Ask students to arrange coins into heaps, talk about the ways they can sort them in accord with size, value, and name.

You may have your younger pupils count their extra coin and place it in rolls. Deliberately making mistakes can be done by the educators, so they can be corrected by the students in order to see the attentiveness of the kids.

  • Using the colorful, attractive fractional strips to teach the students the concept of fractions. Students can compare the fractional numbers using these tiles. Teachers can use this to teach addition and subtractions.
  • The geared mini clocks are really helpful in teaching constructive time-learning and time-telling ability. These clocks are really beautiful and gain the attraction of students, telling them accurate relations between hours and minutes. The analogue clocks are really confusing for the students to figure out the time, which the clocks with gear can resolve.
  • Utilizing blocks of various shapes and colors by the teachers has evidently shown its worth in letting students know about the shapes like triangles, rhombuses, quadrilaterals, etc. 

Tips For Parents To Use Math Manipulatives:

  • Parents can look around in the room for the things that can be used for counting skill involvement in the children.
  • Linking the cubes together  
  • Arrange the squares in the rectangle like a 2×6 pattern or any other form to let them know how the numbers work. Arrange the 6 squares in 2 rows and make a rectangle out of it.
  • Create different shapes on pegs using the rubber bands. Rubber bands are available hidden in the drawers and can be easily used to construct the various structures to teach students about geometry. Students will love doing this and get encouraged to use their brains more. You can create a square with 5 sq. units, a hexagon, evaluate its perimeter, rectangle of various measurements, etc.

Creative and fun ways to use math manipulatives in the drawer: 

Here are more ideas :

For place value

  • The Base 10 Blocks are meant to represent ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands in powers of ten. These blocks are used to teach number and place value principles. Students, for example, can learn about regrouping in subtraction and addition.

Measurement concepts such as volume and area are also explained using base ten blocks. The materials include 1-centimeter unit cubes for ones, 10-cm rods for tens, and 10-cm square blocks for hundreds.

  • Look for the things that can be grouped in tens. Like sticks, pens, pencils, markers, pipe cleaners, cotton balls, straws, rubber bands to tie them together. You can use them to teach addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication.

For Fraction: Clay, dough, blocks, legos, etc. are useful options you can go for.

For measurement: Ruler, meter stick, liter bottles, thermometer, measuring tape, calculator, stopwatches, etc.

For probability learning: 

Objects that will be helpful in teaching probability are Dice, board games, spinners, coins, bottle caps, playing marbles, toys in bags, etc.

Bottomline: We have provided you with some best manipulatives in math which you can use easily. Though there are many ideas out there, keep noticing, creating, and using reliable ideas to easily learn mathematics for your students and kids. Math won’t be boring anymore. Trust me! 

Carter Martin

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