ABSTRACT
Children love to use calculators, rulers, tape measures and other mathematical tools, but do they know how and when to use them in their everyday lives? Teachers explicitly instruct their students how to use a ruler to measure an object. Then the students practice measuring objects on a workbook page and in the classroom. The same is often true with calculators; teachers show their students which buttons to press to calculate an answer and then the students practice pushing buttons to find the answer to calculations on a workbook page. Teachers need to spend some additional time explicitly instructing their students how to use tools such as these when solving word problems.
