Math Milestones Before 6th Grade - Podcast 83

A www.door2math.com production. When we look at the math topics that need to be mastered by our 6th graders, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged - there are many different math topics and it’s difficult to tell which ones are essential and need to be mastered so our kids can continue to be successful with math after 6th grade. From working over 400+ families and with dozens of different types of math curricula, I believe all that clutter taught to our kids in this age group can be simplified to just four essentials. The first milestone set is adding and subtracting. This is the most basic number operation and it’s just manipulating numbers, that’s it. The second milestone set is multiplication and division. We can think of multiplication as just a quick way to add and division as just a quick way to subtract. So if we lump these two together, we can call these arithmetics operations. The combination of decimals, percentages and fractions is the third big milestone.This skill set is very important as this is most of our daily math communication in society. This milestone I call a magic triangle. So if you can imagine there's a triangle and on the very tippy top let's say there’s a fraction, and on the lower left corner you see a fraction and on the lower right corner you see a decimal. If your child is able to go to each point of the triangle and convert from percentage to fraction to decimal then they’ve mastered this milestone. For example, let's say you have a one over eight, that's a fraction, right? In decimal form it’s 0.125 and in percentages it’s 12.5%. So if you take any one of the these and your child is able to convert to the other two, that’s a good sign. And after that is this concept called the LCM or the least common multiple. The reason that this one is so important is that's it’s the foundation for adding and subtracting fractions and lays the foundation for algebra, geometry and beyond. Learning the LCM operations also trains the mind in critical thinking skills. Unfortunately this is where we lose so many kids in math because the ones that got away with memorizing before won’t be able to successfully complete this milestone.