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Show I Cloke honored by board for taking mystery out of math ; Utah State. Mother of two daughters, she believes passionately, passionate-ly, that test scores notwithstanding, girls are potentially just as strong in math as boys. "But you must start in the cradle with the toys you give them to play with," she explained. "Girls have been deprived since infancy in-fancy of the kinds of toys that give them spatial awareness. They must be treated the same as boys not just in school, but also in the home' she stressed. Economists say that in the very near future, all jobs above the poverty pov-erty level are going to require an understanding of higher mathematics. "Believe me, I'm teaching that to my two girls!" Tuesday the board of education 1 honored Gayle Cloke, fourth grade teacher at Adams Elementary, ' whose innovative teaching takes the mystery out of math. "Today the focus is on problem solving. To make that understandable understan-dable as well as fun, I teach using real live objects or what are called manipulative items." One of Gayle's specialties is teaching fractions, frac-tions, "always difficult for kids to grasp because they only have sym-. bols to woric with. But if you take a pizza pie and .use slices of it in different colors to serve as common denominators it begins to make sense." "Say you ask the class to subtract sub-tract 19 from 14. Get the kids to manipulate the pieces of colored i pizza until they've found that com- r mon denominator that shows them how to solve the problem. You have moved them from the manipulative to the symbolic and they have the thrill of discovering how to do it. Fractions are no longer abstract symbols.". Gayle belieyes you can start teaching fractions as early as the first grade using this method. Then when fractions are a serious subject in fourth or fifth grade, they'll remember re-member how to work them. "It becomes a piece of cake, (or a pizza, piz-za, as the case may be)." A teacher for 18 years, 13 of them in -Davis School District, I3ayle hasalsQlaugh'L . music "There's a lot of math in music," you know. Her teaching flair has made her a popular teacher at workshops for the Utah Chapter of the National Council of Teachers of Math. "Until recently, most teachers haven't known how to demonstrate the manipulative to explain the symbols in math so we share ' these ideas at the workshops." A graduate of Weber State College, Col-lege, she has almost completed her masters in elementary education at |