Photos for Math Gnome Stories

All of my notes for this block are on my website at Math Gnome Stories. Here are a few photos from my teacher planning pages:

introduction to skip counting (0-24)

Skip Counting Patterns to 24 (PDF)

introduction to number sentences
in Waldorf they are written from the whole to the parts

arranging 12 gems on our boards in many different ways

number sentences after our subtraction stories

finding the X in the cart's wheels, jingle bell, suspenders, and
the happy cartwheel of Tommy Times

arranging our gems in arrays, like cabbages in a garden,
as Tommy Times helps the farmers learn to plant more

note the visual relationship betwen the symbols for making more
"x" is speed addition... looks like a "+" rolling down a hill

we don't know how tall Maggie is, but how high would the wave of molasses be if it was four times taller? (from The Great Molasses Flood)

tearing a paper gem in half to see how much faster the medicine arrived in Nome (from the The Bravest Dog Ever: The True Story of Balto)

you can see the relationship between multiplication and division when you draw out how they organize their gems

the difference between them is that multiplication asks "how many are there in all?" and division asks "how much does each one get?"

When you are working with a child on identifying what operation is needed for a particular problem, and they think that an addition problem (with different amounts) is a multiplication problem (with the same amount), you have some options. You could draw out the different amounts, or you could make them with the gems, or you could just ask "ok, what number would you skip count by?"

When they realize that this wouldn't make sense with the given problem, they will realize that it's an addition problem.

Hope these notes and photos are helpful! Remember, there is more than one way to teach this block. This is just what we happened to come up with!

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