I have taught for 27 years in the Texas Public School System and have been lucky enough to get to spend 25 of them teaching elementary math.

While classroom experience is what most people would like to know about in order to validate my ability to create appropriate resources, my experience actually goes back 47 years to when my sister was born.  You see, I’m the oldest of 7 children and have been teaching (they would say bossing) my siblings since that day.

As you can imagine, our house was quite busy growing up.  I often stepped in to help with homework.  One thing I can assure you is that I did not know anything about hands-on activities or high yield strategies at that time.  If someone needed help with math homework, I broke it down for them so they could see the step-by-step process for solving the problem.

Fast forward to my own children and the picture is much the same.  When they needed math help, they got the step-by-step breakdown of whatever math process they were working on.   My kids spent a lot of time in my classroom after school.  Even surrounded by all the math manipulatives they would ever need, they still just wanted to know how to work the problems without all the extra.  I am happy to report that all of my children excel in the mathematics area.

Don’t worry about all those expensive manipulative! They got some use.  My daughter and her cousin loved to play hide-and-seek with them.  I’m still missing my triangular prism.