Bridging the Gap Between School and Home Using Virtual Manips

In my previous post about virtual manipulatives, I discussed the benefits of using virtual manipulatives for engagement purposes. Upon reflection, it also occurred to me that these virtual manipualtives, available in the online the McGraw-Hill Virtual Manipulatives toolkit, would be a great resource to offer parents as their children are completing homework or preparing for a unit test. If students are given the opportunity to handle real manipulatives in class and then have access to a computer at home, they would be able to review the strategies they learned using virtual manipulatives.  This interactive and constructivist learning experience could be reinforced using the same tools they handled in class. Providing parents with access to the site and encouraging students to practice using manipulatives at home would bridge the gap between school and home, where math manipulatives are probably unavailable.

I can imagine this being helpful to several of my students who benefit from repetition of very concrete examples of math concepts.  For example, in a recent unit students explored fractions and had difficulty identifying and justifying equivalency.  We practiced identifying equivalent fractions using fraction bars.  This strategy is very common as a way of introducing students to equivalency and some students grasp the concept sooner than others.  For those who were struggling, I was unable to send them home with the durable, plastic fraction bars I use in school, and had to settle for paper manipulatives that were easily lost between school and home.  Next time, I may simply email the parents of these target students the link to the website I provided above and offer instructions for some exercises or games they might play to reinforce the concept of equivalency.  I think students would benefit from an exercise like the one I modeled below, in which students would have to find two or more equivalent fractions and prove their equivalency using fraction circles and bars/tiles.