There’s a new math book coming out this fall called You Can, Toucan, Math. And unlike other math riddle books, the solution is not simply the answer. These are math problems that are rhyming math problems all based on birds, but the question is not simply, “How many?” The question is, first, how do you find out how many? Which operation do you use, and then what’s the answer? And what happens with a lot of children is they jump to the answer. And that’s fine for that one problem, but that doesn’t really teach you a method. It doesn’t give you the way of going about solving a math problem.
So, I talk at the very beginning about when you use each operation – when do you add, when do you subtract, when do you multiply, when do you divide. And then for each problem, I ask the child, “What do you do?” and then, “What’s your answer?” And I heard just at the conference that some kids, when they have multiple-choice questions, they just take all the numbers, play with them until they come up with one of the answers for the multiple-choice questions. That’s a strategy for getting an answer to the problem, but it doesn’t really teach you how to do the operation.
