Strategic Intervention Solutions

Strategic Intervention Solutions comes from SIS4teachers.org, and Shannon McCartney introduces each episode as an installment of its blog. The subject is elementary math instruction. More precisely, it covers the concrete and visual tools that make numbers visible to young students, and the reasoning each tool is meant to build. Ten frames come up again and again. In 'Progression of Conservation: Foundations for Numeracy Development', Shannon describes cards that show counters in different configurations across ten frames. The cards are flashed quickly so students can name the parts and the total without counting one by one. She presents this as an extension of subitizing, and she clearly loves the cards. That episode also pauses on the school year itself, noting how much better students do in classrooms than in front of screens during virtual instruction. It closes by promising a look at conservation to 20 and at making a friendly ten. Place value discs get a full walkthrough spanning second through fifth grade. Shannon identifies them as a non-proportional manipulative and then works through decimals. Students show one tenth more than two and thirty-four hundredths, then add a tenth to three and ninety-eight hundredths and watch ten tenths become a single ones disc. Dollars and dimes serve as the everyday comparison, and the zero left behind in the tenths place gets its own attention. The other strand is teacher's guides to the Math Mights show, which spans kindergarten through third grade. These recaps explain what particular episodes do and why. One describes number talks as the early warm-up, followed by a character who solves story problems with visual models, also known as unit bars or tape diagrams. Another praises a place value board, with tens on one side and three empty ten frames on the other, for first graders renaming eight tens and fourteen ones. A third uses apples on a balance scale to build the language of greater than, less than and equal to. What connects these pieces is a steady wariness of shortcuts. Shannon questions the hungry alligator that eats the bigger number, and she worries about students rushed into the traditional algorithm before multiplying up makes sense to them. The delivery is warm, practical and openly enthusiastic, with frequent pointers to free cards, virtual manipulatives and downloadable PowerPoints.