Zeroes

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2004 : September : 25

Zeroes
By Jennifer

Our math program teaches the children a shortcut called "subtract 1". Have the children just subtract one from both numbers....so 70,000 becomes 69,999 and 23,619 becomes 23,618. The answer is the same. I think it's considered the associative property of mathematics, whatever you do to one part of a problem you do to the other. We do teach the kids to do it the real way too.

You can do this shortcut with nubers other than zero (like 70,003-51,876..it would be subtract four from the problem). The one word of caution is that you need to model it a million times and stress that they should only do it when necessary and to problems with 00000's, otherwise they'll want to do it with every problem!

Hope this helps!
Jennifer