The Build Math Minds Podcast Christina Tondevold

Here in the United States, it is the end of the school year and teachers are contemplating what work they should send home with students for them to do over the summer.  In today's podcast, I get into why I'm not a big fan of general problem packets over the summer and how the phrase "practice makes perfect" is a little inaccurate.

I've been on a kick about math fluency lately and how a lot of textbooks have their teaching of fluency wrong. Growing up, fluency to me meant being good at the algorithm.  Being able to follow the steps that the teacher laid out for students was the sign of being fluent. But, as textbooks have started teaching new strategies, students and parents are left feeling confused. In today’s episode I wanted to share this chart I found in an article by Randall Charles because it highlights the importance of letting kids use strategies instead of just the traditional algorithm.  

In the last episode of the podcast, I shared the three ideas that make up computational fluency. Flexibility is often the piece that is missing in our fluency instruction, but recently textbooks have tried to incorporate more of it, but in the wrong way. In this week’s podcast, I go over some of the shortcomings in the ways textbook’s teach fluency and what we should really be focusing on when we’re teaching fluency.

 The Flexibility Formula courses that I offer have a huge focus on how we can help kids develop number sense, but the main reason to focus on number sense is really to help your students become flexible thinkers; to build their flexibility in mathematics. In episode 144, I talk about how my courses started and the research that inspired them. Come take a listen as I discuss the concepts that make up computational fluency.

Each of you listening to this podcast have different goals for your professional development.  You have different things you are wanting to read about to help your students next year have an even better math experience in your classroom. So I’ve compiled a bunch of different lists on Amazon so you can choose from books for specific areas you want to focus on. Come check out Episode #143 where I share my summer reading lists for elementary math teachers for 2022.