Alexandria Country Day School: Math in Focus: Zooming in on Daily Practice, Part One

With the school year in full swing, our students are settling into the new routines and procedures of Singapore Math. Every day during the math lesson students are actively engaged--trying out problems on mini whiteboards and building with base-10 blocks or Unifix cubes while the teacher explains the day’s lesson, explaining their answers (and mistakes!) using models and pictures to help them deepen their understanding, and working independently at their own level to practice the new skill they acquired during the day’s lesson.

Fourth graders are using place value chips to help them learn multi-digit multiplication.

Math in Focus is based upon the pedagogy of Singapore Math, which emphasizes a three-step approach to learning new concepts. This approach takes students from concrete (working with manipulatives) to pictorial (working with visual models) to abstract (working with numbers and symbols) to help students develop a strong foundation in mathematical understanding. Typical American programs tend to skip the pictorial component, which can compromise a student’s depth of understanding. Our teachers have been likening the importance of the pictorial step to that of the visualizing strategy in reading comprehension; if readers can understand a story better and experience it more deeply by creating mental images (a “mind movie” as we call it), then won’t mathematicians better understand a problem if they can create a mental image (visual model)? Without this critical step in learning, our learners may miss important details that lead to greater understanding of concepts.

Below you can see more pictures illustrating the concrete step in Singapore Math’s pedagogy. Stay tuned for part two of this blog post, where the pictorial and abstract steps will be highlighted.