How to Introduce Algebra to Kids

These days I start by thinking about the kind of the broad route I want to take through what we're trying to learn first. So let me stick with this algebra one, for instance, I wanted to start with this idea of the structure Tony Gander calls it the structure arithmetic or structural arithmetic. And then I wanted to look at how we use that to write. It's kind of to motivate writing expressions as a generalization of numerical patterns. Then I wanted to move on to a bit more work in expressions in more depth and we were using algebra tiles and what we're making.