Mental Math Strategies: your goal should be to show students a wide variety of mental strategies, provide opportunities where each method can be used and encourage students to use mental math strategies regularly to improve their skills. Students need sufficient practice with mental math strategies to ensure mastery.
We encourage alternate strategies or algorithms because:
- one algorithm may make sense to one student but not another; or
- some strategies may lend themselves to a better understanding of number (number sense).
The "Show Me" videos below are not perfect (translation terrible). They have many errors, however, you cannot edit them. (you must start over from the beginning) So, I will post them until we have an opportunity to redo them. Feel free to laugh along with me while you watch them. My hopes are that we can have students explain the strategies eventually.
Subtraction
Addition
Multiplication
Division