Background: We’ve all been there: a student is reading aloud and everything is going fine until….. 1995. They stop dead in their tracks, looking to you to throw them a life preserver. You work it out, unit by unit, and then five minutes later, they have completely forgotten.
Numbers past 100 are often daunting for students of all levels, so I try to make it a bit more fun. Given that this chapter of Dicho y Hecho (our intro textbook) is focused on México, I combine numbers with a lesson on Mayans.
The Lesson in Action: Can be watched here
Reflection: Numbers are dreadful to teach because, once you get past 100, it can get confusing and you start losing weaker students. While this lesson does not guarantee that weaker students will completely understand, it does fuse culture with number learning and takes a potential boring topic and makes it pop!