Building Powerful Addition in Young Learners

 This two day workshop addresses the needs of those who teach young learners (K-3).  The brain of the young learner is primed to seek meaning and make connections. How can we build on students’ budding number sense and use their innate curiosity to fuel the learning of important mathematical ideas and skills?

At this stage of development, we focus on:

• constructing relationships between numbers, numerals, and number names
• building a sense of magnitude, quantity, and cardinality
• understanding our number system and the role that language plays in muddying or clarifying relationships, and
• developing flexibility, sophistication, efficiency, and creativity with addition strategies.

As teachers, we support that construction process by providing powerful contexts, models, tasks, and games that allow for exploration, investigation, and play toward purposeful ends.

We learn games and activities that help students move along the landscape of learning from one-to-one correspondence and subitizing through unitizing to learning addition facts and the properties of addition.  We will explore the role of context, teacher modeling, and open-middle problem solving to aid you in creating an engaging and rich learning atmosphere in your classroom.

This workshop is appropriate for teachers of grades K-3.

Building Powerful Subtraction in Young Learners

In this two day workshop, you will experience games, activities, models, and strategies that help students develop a robust understanding of subtraction.  We will explore how to create a fun and rich learning atmosphere in your classroom.

Come learn how to help your students:

•  understand when contexts call for removal versus finding the difference
• use models to communicate student thinking when solving problems
• develop flexibility, efficiency, and creativity with subtraction strategies, and
• switch between difference and removal regardless of the context, in order to use an efficient strategy.

Your students, their parents, and higher math teachers will thank you for coming to this workshop.

This workshop is appropriate for teachers grades K-3.