David Hewitt's video

David gets students' attention by making a loud banging sound with a long awkward stick. The sound helps them decide when to start counting. His introduction to variables is very interesting. He says 'lets say it's' such and such number than adds another number and deducts a third number, than repeats the exercise by changing the beginning number. With that he shows how the beginning number is not important so it could be any number - becomes an x. Great introduction to variables. Then verbally expressing the equation helps kids understand how to write it out and understand the relationship between all the numbers and variables in the equation. So, this helps them figure out the order when they are solving it.