One key 1st grade math skill

We've heard math is different under Common Core, but how? One teacher explains how she's teaching kids about numbers differently now — in a way we can all understand.
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YouTube video

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.”

Learn more about your first grader’s learning and development this year, including:

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