Happy December!
Students in Grades 2-5 have been using a strategy called bar modeling to show their work on word problems. This visual is a wonderful representation of the part-part-whole relationship for addition and subtraction and is an excellent way to show multiplication, division and fractions as well.
The strategy has become so popular that a great interactive website called Thinking Blocks was developed to help students understand how the model works and how to create their own models. I encourage you to try it with your child! There are video tutorials that will help you to better understand this strategy.
