The Decimal Board

Today Ken got her first presentation of the Decimal Board. I decided to give her presentation #3 in the Math I album that you can find at Cultivating Dharma. Ken is familiar with decimals as she was introduced to this concept in fourth grade while attending public school. She was taught how to add and subtract and can successfully do so, but can not tell you the why or read the decimal number correctly. It has a lot to do with understanding place value which she now has a good grasp on and her fraction work is O.K enough to go ahead and do this work.

 I am glad that I already had the Rack and Tubes to go along with the Decimal board, they are needed and when you purchase the materials you may assume that you will have everything needed to present the material.

                                                                             
In the presentation to add some excitement you would want to make a candelabra out of paper that will represent flames that the unit is the king of the decimal system. As shown in the picture above the green unit bead is wrapped in aluminum foil to show that indeed the unit is the king. I am deliberately leaving some information out, so that you can go ahead and look through the album yourself by the author who wrote this presentation. Ken enjoyed this particular part of the presentation and if you can cut out the candelabra then I am sure your child will fall in love with this material. After three tries I gave up it didn't look appealing at all.

                                                                           
I then placed the cubes and beads according to their representation. Then I asked Ken to build numbers and then match them to the correct cards. We continued this step until she was confident in matching the cards and reading the number aloud.

I asked her if she wanted to put it away or work with it some more. Ken decided this was fun and continued working more and then called me over when she completed an addition problem.

  She continued to work herself right into the next presentation that would introduce exchanging. I had fun watching Ken manipulate the cards and the cubes and I would have never thought exchanging would bring a smile to her face.

I can't say enough how introducing the material to the child at the right time makes such a huge difference in their acceptance and readiness of the material.  

Linking this post to Math Monday