My favorite manipulatives for teaching math

I'll be blogging soon about how these manipulatives can be used, but for now, I'll just introduce them.   

There are a lot of manipulatives out there for teaching math concepts.  Some are pretty pricey.  some, however, can be made from things at home.  Counting and sorting, for example, can be done with buttons, beads, beans, or Legos. These are also good tools for making patterns.  In the picture below, I have eggs for teaching algebra, a number line made of beads on a string for teaching positive and negative, and a box of craft sticks bundled into tens and hundreds.  Index cards make great flash cards for drilling math facts.  Also pictured are a simple 5x10-bead slide abacus and a more traditional, two level abacus, both made from craft sticks, beads, and bamboo skewers.      

                    

For teaching fractions, I like to use measuring cups and rice, plus a few shapes cut out of construction paper or felt, but that will be another day's blog entry.

I also have been pleased with several commercially available math tools, including a slide abacus, Cuisenaire rods and Math-U-See blocks.  For drilling math facts, the Flashmaster is a user-friendly electronic device that a student can use on her own.  It provides immediate, non-threatening feedback and records students' scores so parents can keep track of their progress. The School House Rock dvd has fun multiplication songs for introducing or reviewing those facts.

While these are just a few of the products available for teaching math, they are the ones I return to again and again to help my students understand what the numbers are doing.