Day one of the Singapore Math Conference

I just got home from day one of the Singapore math conference.

The table I was at and I all said that if they would have taught math this way when we were in school we would have taken over the world. :)

There are some things that we did today that made me think strike me with the music wand (his attention getters that I thought were cool!) because that was the sound going off in my head when we did the problems.

For example:

97 + 54= Put circles around all of the tens so around 90 and 50
/\ /\
90 7 4 50 then break down your ones so that you can regroup them as tens
/\ 7+3=10 and circle that problem, now you know that you have
90 7 3 1 50 16 tens or 160 and 1-one, for a total of 161.


Or for adding fractions

1/3 + 1/2 draw a rectangle and divide it horizontally in fraction for the first fraction (pretend this is a true retangle with three sections

______________________
a
______________________
b
______________________
c
______________________

And shade in the fraction needed

______________________
a xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
______________________
b
______________________
c
______________________

Next divide the rectangle in the fraction from the second fraction

So in our example one line down the middle of the fraction.
__________(____________
axxxxxxxxxx(xxxxxxxxxxxx
__________(____________
b (
__________(____________
c (
__________(____________

Now color in the number of squares you need for the second fraction.

__________(____________
a xxxxxxxx(xxxxxxxxxxxx
__________(____________
b ssssssss(ssssssssssss
__________(____________
c ssssssss(
__________(____________

Count up the number of boxes colored in, and put this number over your total number of boxes, so in this case it would be 5/6.

This would so show up better if I had paint on Jerry's computer and could do it on there. ;) But hopefully you get the idea.

Hopefully the next two days are as helpful and interesting.

I ran into Kelsey's second grade teacher at the conference too. She came up to me at the end of the day and said, are you Kelsey's mom? Talk about a small world. I promised to take pictures tomorrow to show her. :)