Blog

I recently joined a 5K training group. There are people in the group who volunteer to serve as coaches to individuals who seek to move themselves from a sedentary lifestyle toward a more active one. In my role as a math coach, this was a great experience for me. It really got me thinking about…

How much is 12.6 × 10? This is a question from the Math Reasoning Inventory (MRI) decimal assessment. What do you think were the most common incorrect answers given by the more than 7,800 students who figured out the answer in their heads? And what about the boy who answered, “One hundred twenty and thirty-fifths?”

This post was originally published on Marilyn Burns’ Math Blog. Involving students as creators of problems for others to solve provides an experience for them that’s different from the teacher always being the source of problems. Also, when students have opportunities to solve their classmates’ problems, I find that they invest in their learning in a different way, often with…

Word problems have long been difficult and frustrating for students to solve and for teachers to teach. A colleague recently forwarded an email from a woman looking for resources to help her fourth-grade granddaughter with word problems. I thought for several days about how to offer positive support to both the grandmother and her granddaughter.

I taught this mental math lesson to a class of fourth graders. I chose an addition problem—99 + 17—for the students to solve mentally, purposely selecting a problem that would be accessible to the students. Also, I knew that the problem could be solved in different ways. I planned to elicit from the students strategies for figuring out the sum of 116 and then to show video clips of other students solving the same problem. After watching each video clip, we’d analyze how the student reasoned and then check back to see if anyone in our class used the same strategy.

My friend Ann sent me an email about her unsettling experience at the supermarket deli counter. Ann has never felt particularly confident with her math ability, and I was pleased (and amused) that she asserted herself in this situation. Also, Ann’s comment to me about the work we face as math teachers rang true.

A long-standing instructional practice has been to teach students how to multiply (or add, subtract, or divide) and then, after the students have learned to compute, give them word problems to solve. In this post I present a lesson with a different approach, where word problems become the lead and reason for learning to compute.

Several months ago I received an email message from my friend Sandra. She wrote, “If you want something new to distract you, try playing the new game 2048. I’m finding it addicting.” I took Sandra’s advice and downloaded the free app. And, like Sandra, I found it addicting. But it also led me to think more about what I think is important when we teach math.

Students’ ideas often amaze me, and Lydia’s is one of the most suprising examples. She used 7 x 3 = 21 to figure out that 8 x 4 = 32. She reasoned that since the factors in 7 x 3 were each 1 less than the factors in 8 x 4, she’d just increase each digit in the answer, changing 21 to 32. She was correct! Read about Lydia’s discovery, what I did, and what I learned.

April 22nd is Earth Day, and it’s the perfect time to celebrate our planet with some fun math activities! Allow your students to step into the shoes of Eratosthenes, who originally found the measurement for the circumference of the Earth, with “The Librarian Who Measured the Earth”, a fun exploration of circumference. Make sure to check out Farmer’s Math…