Pathways P.D.

A colleague joined me to do a math professional development session at Pathways to Education for their staff and volunteers.

We used concept circles to explore base 10 blocks and saw how to use them to practice place value and integers.

We worked on multiplication, like 6×23 and how to represent that as 6 groups of 23 (an additive approach) and also how those 6 groups can be made into a rectangle with length 23 and width 6. The area is the product. We can then visually split up the area model into 6×20=120 and 6×3=18 so 6×23=138.

We looked at algebra tiles and how we can represent multiplication with the area model using tiles, and also how to simplify and add polynomials. Finally we used tiles to solve equations.

I hope we’ll do more sessions over the term to build on these skills.