Manipulatives

 

Using manipulatives in elementary mathematics is extremely important for students to gain a conceptual understanding of a variety of mathematical topics. It can be difficult for teachers to determine if students can transfer their understanding from manipulatives to other situations but this is why teachers need to plan time to have students learn the concepts with the manipulatives and then give the students time to solve the problems and only use manipulatives to check their work before finally removing the manipulatives and assessing the student’s knowledge because they won’t usually have these manipulatives in higher grades and outside of the classroom. In order to assess this growth and understanding, teacher observation and questioning are crucial. Teachers need to walk around the classroom or pull individual students or small groups and have students demonstrate their thinking with and without manipulatives. Manipulatives are also great because they help students improve their problem-solving skills by using different representations of the same problem and being able to decontextualize the problem to solve with the manipulatives and then contextualize it back to the original problem 

Although group work has many benefits, it can be difficult to hold students accountable for learning when in groups. One way to do this is to purposefully build groups of students who are all learning at the same level. If a group has one or two students who are at a higher level, those students may do all the work for the group and the other students won’t learn anything. It is also helpful for teachers to build groups of students that get along with each other so they feel comfortable trying and making mistakes. During group work, it can also be difficult to assess each person’s depth of understanding. Teachers should be walking around the classroom observing students and jumping in to ask questions to students about what they are doing and having students explain their reasoning.