Summer Fun - Adding With Carrying

At our North Portland location, we are having fun.  The girl in the picture aced a problem involving adding with carrying, as seen in the video at the bottom of this post.  She just turned 7.  When she was 6, we were able to teach her the commutative properties of addition and multiplication.

This last week we also spent some productive time with a couple of older kids whose teachers seem to have dropped the ball in a major way as far as developing math skills.  During our teaching session we made a major breakthrough in understanding subtraction with borrowing.  These kids are now energized and greatly encouraged by the discovery of their own competence.  In fact, they were begging us for homework before they left.  (A surreal moment indeed!)

Work is also progressing on Book 4 of our Elementary School Math for a Flying University series.  I may already have mentioned this, but I have responsibility for writing the chapter on word problems.  I am working on crafting word problems which not only develop critical thinking, but which also produce conscientization, also known as consciousness-raising.

And now for the video: