| Common Denominators |
Best Practices in Ontario LBS |
- Use drills, flash cards, board work, oral
exchanges, etc. to promote variety and to address all the learning
styles.
- Make teaching a personal, interactive
experience; this allows the learner to feel valued.
- Facilitate peer tutoring when it is appropriate.
- Prepare handouts that illustrate common
errors in numeracy learning; discuss these in class.
- Place value: use bundles of straws
in groups of 10; use loonies, ten-dollar bills, hundred-dollar bills
on a place-value chart. This can be extended to decimals using dimes
and pennies.
- Basic facts: Explain these in a
real-life context, i.e. 2 x 3 = 6. Reading out “two times three
equals six” does not make it easy for the learner to understand.
In a real-life context, there are two packages of tomatoes, each pack
having three tomatoes. One pack of three and another pack of three,
that is, two times the three, and you get six tomatoes!
- Equivalent fractions: Again, use
a real-life context to explain the problem. If you divide a pizza
into 8 pieces and then eat 4, you’ve eaten one half. If you divide
it into 12 pieces and then eat 6 pieces, you’ve still eaten one
half, so
- Percents: use a chart.
| part |
percent |
| whole |
one hundred |
This leads to the use of a proportion:
| part |
|
percent |
|
= |
|
| whole |
|
one hundred |
|