Many readers may be saying, "What in the world is PEMDAS?" Simply put, it is an acronym for the mathematical order of operations. I work one-on-one with a middle school student and we spend fifth period each day in a sixth grade learning resource center math class. Many of these students struggle with math. They find multiplication mind boggling, division daunting, and fractions frightening. How could I expect these students to understand exponents, much less the order of operations. One day, in the middle of class, I suddenly had an idea; what if I turned the kids into the math problem? I used post-it notes and a very simple problem to test my idea. Order of operations was now very visual. A few days later I presented a full scale lesson based on this idea. The students were actively engaged, and one student even came up with a creative way to understand exponents. I was able to incorporate his idea into the lesson on the fly. Everyone enjoyed the lesson, and the students learned about both exponents and order of operations.
If you have difficulty viewing this video, it can be found at www.vimeo.com/kellysipe/pemdas
The video was taped using a simple Kodak digital camera in movie mode. The file was then converted to a MP4 file using I-Movie, and finally uploaded at vimeo.com. Vimeo is a free service, similar to You-Tube, that allows users to upload files up to 500MB in size. The web site was very easy to use and I will use often to post videos of my classroom.
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