Visualising maths

Solving maths problems starts with understanding what the problem is. To do this one of the most powerful techniques is to draw the problem. A drawing enables you to visualise the maths problem. In drawing, one is forced to make the abstract maths concepts and numbers concrete... it is impossible to draw an abstract concept, the very act of drawing causes it to take on form (of one sort or another). Puppet Maths is a visual presentation of maths, consequently, by the very nature of the medium we work in, we have to give maths form. The form we give it is that which I was taught as a child (there were always good maths teachers out there). We use dice to get children thinking of numbers as a series of dots. We organise these dots into piles, which, when they reach a height of 10, magically change into a ten. What does that mean? Well to explain we shift our description to one involving coins... each dot becomes a penny piece and ten of these in a pile is equivalent to a 10 penny coin... and in turn ten of these 10p pieces (florins) can turn into a £1 coin. The purpose is to get the pupil thinking about real objects rather than struggle with strange shapes like "3" and "5". [Incidently these two shapes look alike to younger pupils, an appreciation of left and right doesn't necessarily develop until a child is 8 or 9 years old - my own daughter, when she started at school, would write a line of text from left to right, and then write the next line from right to left in mirror lettering - and she would see nothing unusual in it]. When we teach fractions we get the pupils to imagine them as slices of a pizza, or as a position along a line, so that they have a means for visualising what the numbers represent. The Singapore maths course takes a similar approach, making maths visual, so that the pupil can understand the problems they are given. We at Puppet Maths are proud to be working under the same principles as the Singapore maths course.