In Mrs.

Murrays 4th grade math class at Brookdale Elementary School, has many math manipulatives and math tools available for teaching and student use. Brookdale E.S. receives extra funding to assist with building the curriculum, so teachers have various resources and materials to teach the curriculum. They receive an abundant amount of school supplies and have the ability to get whatever they need, simply by requesting the specific item to their team manager, assistant principal, or school secretary. The teacher keeps the maniplatives in clear labeled bins on shelves in the classroom. Most are separated into baggies for individual student use to save time. When manipulatives are needed for certain lessons or activities, she allows the students to pass them out. They are not stored in student desks. Her math manipulatives and materials include rulers (metric and universal), tape measures, capacity containers, measuring cups, scales, protractors, pattern blocks, calculators, various colored counters, geometric shapes planes, geometric shapes solids, decks of cards, various types of dice, fraction bars, geo boards, math games, manipulatives for the overhead projector, fraction strips, connecting blocks, math calendar with monthly pieces, graph paper, spinners, bingo games (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), whiteboards and markers, math journals, clocks, base ten blocks/mats and units, scissors, teaching posters, and much more. There are enough of most math tools and manipulative items for students to have their own. When the teacher was teaching the concept of division as breaking a number into equal groups, she used various counters to demonstrate the division concepts. Students also had an opportunity to use the counters to make division number sentences to show their understanding. Students were able to see that the number of counters she started with was the dividend which goes into the division house when the problem is written down. When the students actually broke the manipulatives into equal groups they were able to also see the divisor as how many equal groups and the dividend as how many in each equal group. Using the manipulatives to learn division made the learning of division more clear to students because they could move around objects and not just look at numbers. The lesson was successful and students were all participating and engaged. Overall, math manipulatives are used often during math lessons to provide hands on learning of concepts.