In grades 3-5, students extend their understanding of place value, larger whole numbers, fractions and decimals. They develop an understanding of multiplication and division, mastering and applying basic facts. Concrete materials can help students represent and reinforce these important concepts. Activities in this book invite students to use fraction circles to compare fractions and dot arrays to explore multiplication and the distributive property.
Children in prekindergarten focus on counting and gradually master the essential one-to-one matching of an object to a number. By the end of second grade, they can represent one, two and three digit numbers, understand simple fractions and apply a variety of facts and strategies to add and subtract skilfully. This book supports this progression by inviting students to count and order ducklings in a line, compute the total cost of several items on a menu and play a variety of games that reinforce their understanding of number, addition and subtraction.
For many students, learning mathematics in the middle grades represents a watershed activity. If they fall behind or fail at this point, they are unlikely to recover and to pursue a career in the sciences or other mathematics-dependent occupations. The authors reveal at least two of the reasons for this watershed experience. First, the content itself is much more complex than that at the primary grades, a complexity that is only now being fully appreciated. Second, conventional instruction often is based on faulty assumptions about the way in which the content is learned. The chapters present the latest understanding of the nature of the mathematics content in the middle grades and the processes by which it is learned.
This is part of a series that shows teachers how to incorporate NCTM's Curriculum Focal Points for PreK-8 into their current mathematics curricula. The book provides practical ideas, sample student work and a sample state math curricula organised around the focal points. By focusing more intensely on fewer topics at each grade level, students gain a deeper understanding of mathematical ideas.
Follows students' natural progression from measuring with informal or non-standard units to using standard units to measure such attributes as length, weight, angle and temperature. Activities extend students' learning to the measurement of two-and three-dimensional objects. Students work in a variety of lively real-world contexts, gathering measurement benchmarks in a classroom scavenger hunt and investigating the area of a rectangle while acting as owners of a sticker factory, for example.
Being an effective math educator is one part based on the quality of the tasks we give, one part how we diagnose what we see, and one part what we do with what we find. Yet with so many students and big concepts to cover, it can be hard to slow down enough to look for those moments when students’ responses tell us what we need to know about next best steps. In this remarkable book, John SanGiovanni helps us value our students’ misconceptions and incomplete understandings as much as their correct ones—because it’s the gap in their understanding today that holds the secrets to planning tomorrow’s best teaching. SanGiovanni lays out 180 high-quality tasks aligned to the standards and big ideas of Grades 3-5 mathematics, including addition and subtraction of multi-digit whole numbers, multiplication and division of single and multi-digit whole numbers, foundational fraction concepts, foundational decimal concepts, and operations with fractions and decimals. The tasks are all downloadable so you can use or modify them for instruction and assessment. Each big idea offers a starting task followed by: what makes it a high-quality task what you might anticipate before students work with the task 4 student examples of the completed task showcasing a distinct "gap" commentary on what precisely counts for mathematical understanding and the next instructional steps commentary on the misconception or incomplete understanding so you learn why the student veered off course three additional tasks aligned to the mathematics topic and ideas about what students might do with these additional tasks. It’s time to break our habit of rushing into re-teaching for correctness and instead get curious about the space between right and wrong answers. Mine the Gap for Mathematical Understanding is a book you will return to again and again to get better at selecting tasks that will uncover students’ reasoning—better at discerning the quality and clarity of students’ understanding—and better at planning teaching based on the gaps you see.
Like algebra at any level, early algebra is a way to explore, analyse, represent and generalise mathematical ideas and relationships. This book shows that children can and do engage in generalising about numbers and operations as their mathematical experiences expand. The authors identify and examine five big ideas and associated essential understandings for developing algebraic thinking in grades 3-5. The big ideas relate to the fundamental properties of number and operations, the use of the equals sign to represent equivalence, variables as efficient tools for representing mathematical ideas, quantitative reasoning as a way to understand mathematical relationships and functional thinking to generalise relationships between covarying quantities. The book examines challenges in teaching, learning and assessment and is interspersed with questions for teachers’ reflection.
Transform mathematics learning from “doing” to “thinking” American students are losing ground in the global mathematical environment. What many of them lack is numeracy—the ability to think through the math and apply it outside of the classroom. Referencing the new common core and NCTM standards, the authors outline nine critical thinking habits that foster numeracy and show you how to: Monitor and repair students’ understanding Guide students to recognize patterns Encourage questioning for understanding Develop students’ mathematics vocabulary Included are several numeracy-rich lesson plans, complete with clear directions and student handouts.
