Manipulatives

A picture is worth a thousand words. My 3 favorite are "Ohhhh I see!"
Whenever the lesson reaches a point of drawing pictures or a hands on demonstration those are the 3 words I always here!
I am all of a sudden a firm believer in using Manipulatives as much as possible!
Even in 5th grade I want them all the time!
I have been co-teaching math for 4 weeks now and I think what these kids need is hands on first and learn the rules and tricks second.
GO CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE!
Example:
LCM?
Students have to understand what they are doing when they find LCM. When they learn the procedure of finding it first they are not able to visualize anything during problem solving.
So we give them packs of Pencils and Erasers and a situation.
Let them just go at it and solve stuff!
Then go over vocabulary that popped in their head while they did this.
Then I think that putting the things they found into a table would be very beneficial too! Turn hands-on into a table that organizers that hands-on info. which turns into mental math while they use the tricks to solve a word problem.

This way their answer is not just LCM=24. They understand the use of LCM in common problems and everyday situations. They can see the packs in front of them and then see them in this table and then see the LCM in the table.
So they understand what to do and that using LCM is the quicker way.
Now they can just do:
8; 8, 16, 24
6; 6, 12, 18, 24
And know that they found the first 3 multiples of 8 and the first 4 of 6 and those are how many packs of each are needed.
Hopefully of course!
I plan to start every lesson I can with a big question that involves no vocabulary that is specific to a unit or subject. Students will be given tools to solve it and then realize, after, what they were doing.
The big issues I see encountering is time restrictions!
You could just make everything a race?
The End