Michelle Doherty teaches first grade at Encanto Elementary School.
Ms. Doherty explains how she teaches her students to understand numbers now. Hint: it’s much different than it was when she first started teaching.
Video transcript:
“When a first grader leaves my classroom, to be able to decompose that number 10 is very, very important. When they see a math problem in a word problem, we want their children to look for multiples of 10. For the number 47, there’s a hidden number behind that 47. There’s four 10s and seven 1s. We didn’t teach it like that when I first started teaching. It was just the number. The number had no value, no meaning. It was just a number. Whereas now we are looking for the magic number of 10.”
