There are fundamental questions that teachers should ask themselves and their students as they prepare lessons on calculating area. Area measurement is commonly used in everyday life (perhaps to carpet a room or organize a space) and plays a foundational role in mathematics from multiplication all way up to calculus. Despite the usefulness of area…

The standards from the Operations and Algebraic Thinking (OA) domain in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) build on one another across the grades (CCSSI 2010). Understanding each grade level's OA standards is necessary within the broader context of the K-grade 5 OA standards. In this article, the authors share their…

Gesture is a powerful and frequent means of mathematical communication. It is a rich modality through which we may reach out to students and they may reach out to teachers, and this is particularly true for instances in which spoken language is not necessarily a commonality among classroom participants. Indeed, our movements help us share more…

Mathematics education at the high school level is not working for many students. Although there has been steady improvement in mathematics learning at the elementary and middle school levels across the United States, for the past decade, student achievement has remained essentially flat at the high school level (NCES 2015, 2016). One possible…

The right types of technology can create new opportunities for students to demonstrate mathematical understandings and can strengthen existing formative assessment practices. The authors write that they frequently use the Math Learning Center apps--covering the range of manipulatives and models--to empower students to explain their thinking. The…

Classroom discourse is critical to helping students learn mathematics. Interacting with peers and the teacher within a classroom community assists students in building their understanding of mathematical concepts. A discourse community, sometimes referred to as a math-talk learning community, is "a classroom community in which the teacher and…

Word problems are an essential component of providing a context for computation but are also recognized as an enduring struggle for students. Students are challenged to solve these story-based problems, often resorting to trial and error. This article presents meaningful alternative approaches to helping students make sense of word problems.

The sandwich problem described in this article would likely be considered more appropriate for third grade or above. However, as members of the research team for a lesson study involving teachers from kindergarten through fourth grade, the authors saw kindergarten students rise to the challenge. The authors invite readers to review two scenarios,…

In this article, Lindsey Fowler describes how an animal rhyme--that she shared with her fifth-grade students with the intention of assisting them with the concept of metric conversions--made fostering the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) more difficult. The addition of animals, which added an extraneous element that students mistakenly…

Tape diagrams, also known as strip diagrams, bar models, fraction strips, or length models, are linear representations that can be used to effectively model quantitative relationships during problem solving. Tape diagrams are a powerful model recommended by the Common Core, but they are relatively new to teachers and students in the United States.…

A second-grade class visits Saint John's Food Pantry each year and spends the morning learning about the needs of the community. Then students pitch in and help the staff for a few hours. When the children return to school, they create signs advertising a canned food drive, and they place collection boxes at various locations around the school.…

Assessing student learning traditionally involves determining whether students can solve a certain percentage of problems correctly, under the assumption that this achievement indicates they have the knowledge and understanding they need to progress to new topics. This article explores what teachers can learn from looking closely at student…

Because talking about their mathematical ideas is difficult for emergent bilinguals if they do not have experience with the language used to represent those ideas, constructing math lessons wherein the materials and tasks support the development of fruitful talk is an important task for the teacher. Waiting until emergent bilinguals are fully…

Children's intuitive understandings of mathematical ideas--both correct, generalizable strategies alongside misconceptions--showcase the complexity of their thinking. However, recognizing children as complex thinkers is one thing but it is another thing altogether to leverage their ideas to plan for and carry out mathematics instruction. The…

This article examines the importance of developing the notion of place value as a rate of ten. In exploring how to nurture this concept, the author looks at the role of the language of value, the problem types of multistep multiplication and addition along with measurement division, each with ten as an organizing unit, as well as strategically…