Virtual math manipulatives can help the youngest students in learning.
It is a perfect combination of fun and education. We all learn better if we can experience something or practice it. Kids often have problems with visualizing math issues and values represented by numbers.
In these cases, manipulatives work perfectly.
A kid manipulates objects by dragging them, putting them into correct spots, etc. Because of that, they are able to learn by practicing. Colorful objects help to understand important math terms in a fun way.
It is easy to do it being in a classroom because you could
use any available objects. The question is how to manage to use it during
distance learning teaching.
Kids often have problems with the multiplication table and don’t want to learn it.
Sometimes it may be enough to add some colors to math to
encourage kids to creative playing with multiplication. I like teaching kids an
understanding of multiplication using equal groups.
You can easily create math manipulatives in Google Slides.
Find an eye-catching picture and set it up as a background in a slide. Create
an equal group of items and save it as an object without background. Add this
equal group to your slide, copy-paste it 10 times, and stack them one on another
to have a replication effect. Now you can duplicate your slide and add
different multiplication problems to each of them. Students can drag and drop
equal groups to visualize multiplication tasks and solve them.
Below you can find the link to download my free version of
this kind of file.