re: 9+6 = ? "Our young learners might not be altogether comfortable..."

quote:

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I could understand the logic if you were told to look at the 9 first, see how many it takes to get to 10, and then break down the 6 based on that, but that's not what she did.

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yeah my first post was about the broad method

after watching this whole thing, it's no better than wrote memorization. you're teaching another wrote method that the kids are going to memorize and not process. that's the main issue with a lot of the methods i've seen.

one great part about what you described (without the "anchor" terms and circling and all that) is that you see the fluidity of numbers. far too many kids see a number as a single thing. the symbol we use to denote a number (in this case, "9" or "6") leads to kids (especially those who are young and just learning numbers) to see them as an individual unit

by breaking the numbers down into individual units, you created a fluidity that should help in processing more complex calculations

it's just like fractions. fractions throw kids the frick off, mainly b/c it just disrupts their symbolic understanding of a "number". they see "3" and have an OK idea of what it is (they don't really see it fluidly, but they get what it denotes and have memorized how to add, subtract, multiple, etc). when you tell them 9/3 =3 they're all like "hold the frick up" and they freak out

one day we'll teach basic division via fractions and addition via a similar method to the OP and kids will get it more easily