Endorses the projects approach to learning as helping students acquire contextual, personal knowledge rather than learning only isolated bits of content information. Describes the five-step process for doing projects which includes productive thinking or generating ideas, the planning or organizing of ideas, decision making, communication or…

In this story of a teacher-designed activity called Garage Math, 5th grade students broadened their understanding of how mathematics is used in the real world and strengthened their mathematical skills as they assumed the roles of construction workers. (Author/NB)

With imagination, basic computation skills and a "mini-computer", kids find word answers to digital problems and design their own. (Editor)

Four activities with window panes are described and illustrated as they extend children's knowledge of fractional numbers. (MNS)

Encourages teachers to allow opportunities for students to present alternative algorithms, whether the students invent them or learn them, then lead a discussion about the meaning of the operations with the goal of students understanding why the algorithm works. Teachers with students of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds should encourage the…

Discover the treasure of learning activities in your daily paper. This 20-cent text has resources for teaching reading, language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, art, career education, and local history. (Editor)

This is the fourth and concluding article in a series on using mathematical techniques from history to provide an interesting way for middle graders to practice math. (Editor)

Graphs are viewed as extremely useful tools in communication, which enable readers to see at a glance facts that might take several paragraphs to describe adequately. An ability to read graphs critically is seen to be an important objective for any elementary curriculum, and ways to introduce them are presented. (Author/MP)

Basic strategies for developing computational estimation skills are: (1) the front-end strategy, focusing on the front-end digits of the numbers; (2) the rounding strategy, rounding the original numbers to more manageable numbers; (3) the compatible number strategy, changing the original numbers to ones more similar and more manageable; and (4)…

A sample lesson is given in which students apply mathematics on a hypothetical trip. (MK)

Offers methods for teaching the values of coins, their relative values, the values of a set of coins, comparing the values of sets of coins, creating a set of coins with a given value, and creating a set of coins with a given value by using the fewest coins. (ASK)

A two-year study conducted in two fourth grade classrooms investigated the effectiveness of two mathematics curricula. Results found that a direct instruction program, "Connecting Math Concepts," resulted in significantly higher student scores on mathematics tests than the use of a traditional math basal textbook. (Contains references.) (CR)

Presents two problems posed to kindergarten children to challenge and to encourage discourse among the students working in small groups of 8 to 10 children. Results showed various levels of understanding and demonstrated various approaches which serve to give the teacher insight into the level of understanding of the class and the possible need to…

Presents ways of using fanciful stories to engage students in mathematical problem solving. (KHR)

The first four chapters of a 14-chapter, three-volume work on arithmetical applications are contained in this document. Each chapter details the "use classes" of one broad arithmetical concept. (A "use class" of a concept is a set of examples of real world uses of the concept which share a common structure). Each chapter…