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RE: A Lesson Plan using Shikaku Puzzles
This is very cool. I have never heard of it even though I played sudoku when it was all the rage a few years ago. Seems like a good tool for teaching. I suspect that this would fit in with the home-school Math-U-See material, which is my current favorite content for teaching math--way better than what our local schools are doing.
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Thanks @toddrjohnson. It was actually really well received by the students, and the kicker for me is that they actually learn something. I'm going to check out Math-U-See and find if there are any overlaps with what we teach. The good thing I'm finding with Maths, is that it's pretty much universal in teaching basic concepts.
The quality of the Math U See material and method is really hard to see from their website. We started buying it years ago based on recommendations in home school groups. While our kids go to public school, we have to supplement at home, because the public schools are forced to fly through material, instead of using mastery learning. Math U See's videos are really low tech (an old guy at a whiteboard), but his content and use of manipulatives (which you also buy) is brilliant. I've had graduate-level math, yet I've learned things from his videos that I didn't know--mostly ways to think about basic math concepts.
As much as I hate to say it, you don't always need the bells and whistles that technology bring to a classroom to teach something well. Often technology can become counter-productive, in as much as it can dazzle the students, removing their concentration from the object of the lesson.
Unfortunately, I think you'll find that most schools now, public and private alike, move through material at a very fast pace, especially at the earlier years. It's a shame, because this it the time we should be building strong foundations, but it seems the governments believe that our future generations only need a foundation of sorts.