Posts tagged as: math solutions

Differentiating sounds like a lot of work (you can’t be everywhere at once), but a few strategies may help you effectively implement differentiation without becoming overwhelmed.

Once students have mastered addition and subtraction, they get to move on to bigger equations: multiplication. Many adults recall days spent memorizing tables and writing out their work, but you can take an approach that doesn’t require merely committing numbers to memory. Help your students really understand what multiplication is and how it works by…

“I don’t know how to help my child with math homework! I don’t know these new ways of doing math.” We hear this often from parents, right? Often along with another hesitant question, “Is it okay to show him/her my way?” In my last blog post, I wrote about how my vision for math teaching…

How do you combine computation skills and a game in the same setting? The game Race to 200 helps students, and their partners, build their understanding of number computation, number sense, and place value. This game can be played during one class period, but we recommend trying all three versions, over three periods, so students can…

At Math Solutions, we’ve long been advocates of math menus in the classroom. This year at NCTM, we’re celebrating our love for math menus in our Riverwalk Cafe, in Booth 1125. In case you won’t be making it to NCTM this week, here’s a sneak peek at some of our Math Menu activities we will…

Thank you to those who joined us yesterday for our live #NumberTalksChat on Twitter! In case you missed out or would like some interesting ideas for your classroom, check out some of our favorite tweets and ideas below. We look forward to seeing you at our next #NumberTalksChat April 26th.          …

On the first day of my Mathematics Methods course for preservice teachers, I ask my students to solve the Dealing in Horses Problem from Marilyn Burns’ book About Teaching Mathematics, Fourth Edition: I ask my students to consider the problem individually for a few minutes and then discuss and solve the problem in table groups. I…

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

The Pizza Problem is a great way to apply mathematical information in a real-world context. Challenge your seventh and eighth graders to apply their understanding of area and order of operations with the pricing of pizza. When teaching a unit on the area of circles, I asked a class of seventh- and eighth-grade students to investigate…

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…