Reply to No doing well with Common Core, but we'll with Singapore math

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
That should be exactly what she knows and has learned in school.  Once you know the terminology, it is very simple.  Doubles are 4+4, 5+5, etc., which most children learn easily and before other math facts.  Counting on, or count plus one, is 4+1, 5+1, etc., which is simply counting one more number.  So a double plus one is another way of adding 4+5, by breaking it up into 4+4+1, which is easier for some children.   [/quote]

But why make kids memorize doubles?  Why fill their heads with unnecessary terms and strategies?  What exactly this whole "double" concept is for? It's useless for additions and useless for multiplication.  In multiplication are you going to say to your kids "Doubles times three?"

I came a very strong school of math.  And anything that wasn't the shortest, most elegant solution was not accepted in  my math classes.[/quote]

The idea behind doubles is that many/most children already know them.  My kids learned them at 3 or 4 in preschool, so it is already in their repertoire, and they are very familiar with them.  It's a starting point for them, when adding two numbers.  If your children naturally and easily learned all of her number facts, then she can just go straight to them, without resorting to these other methods.

Also, the idea is that children will learn a variety of ways to gain number fluency, so that eventually they will be able to go straight to the easiest, shortest, and/or most elegant solution.  But they don't start them out there, in first grade.  May be better, may not be, but that's how they're doing it nowadays.  I remember the epiphany I had in calculus, when we derived all the geometry formulas for area and volume, etc.  Finally, all those geometry formulas made sense, weren't pure memorization.  But I wasn't ready to learn calculus in middle school, so we could only do the formulas.  [/quote]

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