Roger Howe, a mathematician at Yale University who has thought a lot about elementary school mathematics education, has written Three Pillars of First Grade Mathematics, in which he expands on the CCSS Grade 1 mathematics standards. It’s well worth a read.
I enjoyed reading the 3 Pillars article. The connections this article can help Pre-K -3 teachers make has the potential to change how they think about delivering this critical piece of concepts to their students. Often teachers, mostly inadvertently, represent these concepts through their models and they words as disconnect are discrete skills that the students have trouble making the connections that this article illustrates. I was a school district Elementary Math Specialist for 10 years until recently switching jobs and I spoke about this with my teachers often. You could really see the shift in teachers thinking about a concept through their teaching. Their mind map for teaching early math concepts changes and what follows often times are dynamic changes in types of written and oral questions they pose to their students.
Dr. McCallum,
Thanks for bringing this wonderful article to my attention. Your blog continues to provide me with so much to ponder.
Sincerely,
Deborah Devine
I have been an elementary math coach for ten years, and an elementary teacher for twenty-nine years before that. We are always working on these concepts but I have never read such an excellent, explicit article that pushes all the important understandings for the primary students.
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