Simple Math & Graphs

I found a site today that comes pretty highly recommended by Bill Gates. I thought I would just check it out and see what the buzz was all about. This is a sight that Bill Gates uses with his children to help them understand math. You can find The Khan Academy here. There are thousands of videos concerning math from simple basic math to complex math.

Selena and I watched the video on simple addition. He shows two ways of solving simple addition, one way using circles to represent a fruit, and also the simple number line. I thought this would be a fun exercise to do with Selena. She didn’t want anything to do with the number line, but she did tell me she would use a chart.

I made a chart very similar to the one we used last week, the beads, and our crayons.

This time though I took the chart up to 14, and did not have Selena sort the colors first. She had to just grab one at a time. After she got a few charted in each color, we then started making a couple of simple math equations.

She already had 2 red beads marked on her chart. She took out 6 more red beads, and had to add those to her chart to come up with the answer of 8. We moved onto green where she had 5 green beads and added 9 more to get the answer of 14.

What I loved was how her mind worked. When we started adding the beads to form equations, she went from making X’s to circles in the boxes, just like she had seen demonstrated in the clip off The Khan Academy.