Manipulatives-- Class 3

Manipulatives!
Manipulatives are very useful tools that have been used in mathematics since ancient times.  For example, ancient Romans used/ created the abacus to help them count, however they were not seen yet as educational tools.  Today, there are a variety of manipulatives that could be incorporated into countless different mathematical activities. 

In today’s lesson, we had the opportunity to use a couple different manipulative tools and try to understand how they could be used in a lesson to help students grasp concepts.  I found this task to be rather challenging because I am used to problem solving mathematics by using a paper and pencil, rather than using and manipulating objects.  During this activity, I realized that the majority of the students I will be teaching have not yet developed the ability to use abstract thinking to solve problems, but rather need build their way to abstract thinking gradually.  For this reason, I believe that manipulatives are a key tool to help scaffold students into gradually understanding more complex mathematics.  As a future educator, I must improve my own ability to work with manipulatives, in order to introduce a more hands-on and constructivist method to my teaching.  (i.e. if I am comfortable using manipulatives, I can instruct students to use them to help construct their own understanding and learning of concepts). 


I think that by incorporating manipulatives into the math classroom, it helps bridge the gap between concrete thinking and abstract thinking by allowing students to have a visual representative of the math.  For example, if a student were to first make a prediction of what a certain mathematics concept result in, they could then check their prediction by using real world examples, and concrete models.  From there, students could then transition into using symbols to describe what they observe from their models, and therefore understand abstract mathematical concepts. 

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