Posts tagged as: classroom lessons

Each year our middle school celebrates the circle and its mathematical relationships on “Pi Day,” March 14, using the date of 3/14 to honor the 3.14 approximation of pi. A local bakery donates pies and, in every math class, students measure round things and consume their pieces of pie. Amidst the Pi Day activities, students…

Suzanne H. Chapin, Catherine O’Connor, and Nancy Canavan Anderson Teachers typically are comfortable leading classroom discussions when teaching literature or providing social studies instruction. They value these discussions and rely on them to support students’ learning. However, many teachers aren’t as comfortable making use of classroom discussions for mathematics instruction. In Classroom Discussions: Using Math…

From a Kindergarten and First-Grade Classroom After asking the students to come join me in a circle on the rug, I wrote the number 10 at the top of a piece of chart paper. Next I distributed interlocking cubes by carefully pouring them out near the students so that each child had access to them.…

You can connect fractions with something most students identify with: getting money.

by Lainie Schuster and Nancy Canavan Anderson Asking “good” questions—questions that help students make sense of math—lies at the heart of good math teaching. In Good Questions for Math Teaching: Why Ask Them and What to Ask, Grades 5–8 (Math Solutions Publications, 2005), Lainie Schuster and Nancy Anderson provide teachers with questions across seven math strands. The questions…

I received my first diary when I was six or seven years old and recently rediscovered it in a box of childhood memories. Imagine my surprise when I opened the decades-old journal to find that my first, and most frequent, entry was arithmetic. I had created a series of two and three-digit numbers that I…

Here are tips for creating effective talk-based lessons.