Math Activities for the Special Student in the Regular Classroom

Shirly Bradsby from Lakewood, CO presented a session on activities you can do with students with special needs or any student. She believes in a process approach to teaching. First you need to define the skill or objective. Then diagnose student needs. Provide appropriate activities and evaluate student learning. If needed reteach or corrective instruction. Lastly maintain student records on their progress.
She has written a teacher manual called Math Rescue: Whole Number Computation. The activities are presented in three categories: Concept Manipulative Activities, Practice Activities and Problem Solving Activities.


One concept manipulative activity she shared was Criss-Cross Multipliers. To play the game you would need spaghetti or sticks and overhead projector. You would create the array from the above picture under the overhead. You would ask the students what multiplication problem this array shows. (4 sticks X 3 sticks) Ask, "How can we determine the answer to 4 X 3?" (Count the places where the sticks cross.) You would have the students continue modeling a variety of multiplication problems. Someone thought this might be confusing to students if they tried to count the squares instead of the cross sections. Mrs Bradsby said you would need to make sure the students understood to only count the places where the two noodles crossed.