Many of you know I love fall. I finally live somewhere that actually has fall with beautiful trees and amazing weather. I find myself wanting to attend everything related to pumpkins, apples or leaves and finding any and all activities that include those as well. While I love centers, one of the concepts I think that can be hard to implement is graphing. Whether making picture graphs, bar graphs or line plots, collecting real data is key to making these meaningful. Thankf

Covid has certainly created a lot of learning challenges. Whether students have missed instruction due to illnesses, had interrupted instruction due to school closings/delays, or just lost instruction from the stress of everything. It has definitely been a year! One of the things I have loved about some of the textbooks I've used is when the textbook begins each lesson with some form of review. This type of review is designed to activate prior knowledge to help students co

Recently, I read an article from NCTM about students using tessellation pictures to describe a quantity, and I loved that idea! (You can check it out in Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching July 2021: Using TileFarm to Support Emerging Multiplication by Matt B. Roscoe.) Tessellations are pictures with repeated shape patterns. Many students create these using attribute blocks or make art with them by repeating the same shape with rotations, reflections, and translatio

I love the Olympics! I enjoy watching the best athletes in the world compete and seeing the different events. As I became a teacher, I learned that so much of the data collected from the Olympic events can be used for some valuable instruction. This week, I'm sharing some of my favorite ways to use Olympic data with a FREEBIE template that can be downloaded to begin sharing these amazing events with your students. First of all, if you haven't checked out the Olympics webs

Bar models are probably one of the most popular things people hear about when they research a Singapore-based math education. They may have seen some models used and are curious about how they help students make sense of word problems. As someone who didn't jump on the bar model band wagon willingly, I wanted to share my experience. If you know my story, you know I loved math growing up. I loved the rules and the way things worked. However, in complete transparency, I had

Whenever our students encounter problems, it can be a tricky situation. On one hand, I get super excited about the idea of my students THINKING about everything they know to solve the problem. I love watching their brains work while they access that filing cabinet in their brain of math information and pull out the information to solve a challenging problem. On the other hand, that same process can become a brick wall when it becomes too overwhelming. Students can shut do

This month, I've been working with some fabulous kids in an online fraction class. They are doing a fantastic job learning virtually, but it has driven home some points that I thought would be good to reflect upon this week: Fractions are worthless if you don't have any meaning. We do what we can when with fraction pieces and strips. However, students have to have a foundational understanding of a whole and what it means to have part of a whole. As I've been recording ne

This week, I wanted to talk about an oldie but a goodie. When students are learning their math facts, we often jump straight to the...

Many people don't realize the complexities of teaching fractions until they try to help an 8 or 9-year-old student truly understand what parts of a whole actually represent. In fact, many students just follow the patterns present in fractions without really understanding what's happening. Instead of jumping straight to the abstract notation, we can follow Jerome Bruner's advice and ensure that every new topic is first introduced with a concrete representation to help studen

Students begin learning about plane shapes in Kindergarten for a reason. Their understanding of plane shapes helps them with later concepts with solid figures. Think about it: They begin learning about the number of sides and angles for each plane shape. They learn how these plane shapes form solid shapes. Solid shapes can roll, stack or slide based on their properties. As students move into fifth and sixth grade, they use this foundation to learn about surface area and