With family involvement in early childhood education threatened by time constraints, the authors offer a dynamic solution for building relationships and fostering communication through take-home play bags.

Students' success with fourth-grade content standards builds on mathematical knowledge learned in third grade and creates a conceptual foundation for division standards in subsequent grades that focus on the division algorithm. The division standards in fourth and fifth grade are similar; but in fourth grade, division problem divisors are only one…

This article reports on the findings of manipulative analyses performed by preservice and in-service teachers in an early childhood teacher education program mathematics methods course. The activities are intended to model and promote mathematical analyses for better discrimination between mathematics manipulatives by early childhood teachers.…

This article defines rapport in a teaching context as knowing your students, their different learning styles, and using that relationship with them to teach on a personal level. The author describes an activity using playdough. While giving learners opportunities to interact with others it naturally appeals to a variety of learning styles,…

The importance of laying a foundation for algebraic reasoning at a young age is increasingly being emphasized. In this article, the authors report on an activity that elicits in a natural way algebraic strategies that in a later stage of learning algebra are crucial for solving equations. The activity brings about the students' spontaneous use of…

This technology report outlines a robust and easy to assemble magnetic stirrer that is programmable. All of the parts are recycled from obsolete computer hardware except the Arduino microcontroller and motor driver, at a total cost of around $40. This multidisciplinary approach introduces microcontrollers to students and grants the opportunity to…

The purpose of the inquiry was to understand how children in primary grades (i.e., preschool, kindergarten, and second grade) engaged with affordances and constraints of features in a Base-10 Blocks virtual manipulative mathematics app designed to promote learning opportunities. Researchers conducted one-to-one interviews with 100 primary grade…

HEAT, an instructional program emphasizing a nontraditional hands-on approach to algebraic instruction for urban, predominantly African American middle schoolers, provides a space to explore teachers' beliefs about urban students' mathematical abilities and motivation and addresses how teacher perceptions can intersect with instruction, learning,…

Elementary students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who struggle with mathematics may be limited in opportunities to pursue advanced mathematics potentially impacting post-school outcomes, including postsecondary education and employment opportunities. Interventions that provide visual instruction, such as manipulatives, along with systematic…

The scope of this article is to describe the creation and implementation of specialized adaptations used in teaching the subject of basic cryptography to students who are visually impaired or blind. Included is an overview of events held for visually impaired and blind transition age youth in Alabama and the methods used to engage this population…

The papers in this special issue focus on instructional strategies with manipulatives. Often described as "hands-on learning", these strategies emphasize the use of physical and, more recently, virtual objects to represent target information and concepts. These strategies are frequently suggested as effective techniques for teaching…

This study illustrates how mathematical communication and learning are inherently multimodal and embodied; hence, sight-disabled students are also able to conceptualize visuospatial information and mathematical concepts through tactile and auditory activities. Adapting a perceptuomotor integration approach, the study shows that the lack of access…

The effects of prior encodings of manipulatives (red and blue plastic chips) on children's ability to use them as representations of quantity were tested. First graders (N = 73) were assigned to four conditions in which the encoding of plastic chips was experimentally manipulated. All children then participated in an addition activity that relied…

This study was conducted to investigate whether or not computer-based simulations had a greater impact on science achievement compared to traditional hands-on methods for middle school students in an on-level science course. The study also sought to determine if either method had an impact on retention as well as motivation. The participants in…

Executive functions enable flexible thinking, something young children are notoriously bad at. For instance, in the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task, 3-year-olds can sort cards by one dimension (shape), but continue to sort by this dimension when asked to switch (to color). This study tests a prediction of a dynamic neural field model that…