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Fifteen Ideas for Encouraging Play at Home in Today’s Virtual Learning Environment Welcome to the first of several “idea-generating” articles created to support and ensure successful learning in an environment where school is partially or fully virtual. We know how challenging it can be to engage little ones in a virtual school environment, and yet…

Peek into a math classroom, virtual or physical. What are students doing and saying about their math learning? Are they engaged? Are they thinking critically – evaluating solutions assessing their understanding, revising their strategies, explaining concepts, and connecting mathematics to real life? Excerpt from Learning Forward, June 2020, Vol. 41, No 3 by Sue Chapman…

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…

Subitizing! This ability to instantly “see” how many is a critical component in young students developing number sense.

We know it’s important to encourage our students to adopt a growth mindset towards their mathematical abilities. But when we draw a smiley face on a student’s paper or say “good job,” are we building a growth or a fixed mindset? These types of feedback are meant to encourage but they fail to give students…

Why is it that engaging preschool and kindergarten students in talking about their mathematical ideas is considered such an important key to fostering the development of early math skills? What is gained by devoting valuable time and effort into classroom discussions about math, and how can teachers set the stage for lively and meaningful math…

Many educators share the misconception that because it uses symbols, mathematics is not associated with any language or culture and is ideal for facilitating the transition of recent immigrant students into English instruction. To the contrary, language plays an important role in learning mathematics. Teachers use language to explain mathematical concepts and carry out math procedures.…

During Matt Larson’s webinar Overcoming Obstacles to Make Mathematics Work FOR Students he shared this quote from Dylan Wiliam’s book Embedded Formative Assessment: If your students are going home at the end of the day less tired than you are, the division of labor in your classroom requires some attention. It got me good, as…

Do you want to inspire a culture of mathematics in your classroom and school? Join @Math_Solutions for our first #InspireMathCulture Twitter chat of 2019 Tuesday, January 29th at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT.   Nikki La Londe, Director of Professional Learning, and Nicole Bridge, Professional Learning Consultant, will co-lead a discussion on how our personal math stories affect…

The task of counting may seem simple, but as Ann Carlyle and Brenda Mercado point out in Teaching Preschool and Kindergarten Math, (Math Solutions, 2012), there is an important distinction between the rote or automatic counting that young children start with, and the eventual formulation of a deeper cognitive connection to the meaning of the…