New Resource! MORE Good Questions for grades 5-8
Friends …
I am immensely pleased to announce the release of my latest volume of problems for intermediate and middle school classrooms.
More Good Questions: A Year of Open Ended Math Problems for Grades 5-8 is exactly that — a series of 220 tasks to inspire thinking, connection-making and reasoning for today’s diverse math classrooms.
In this second volume of problems, students will engage with tasks involving the operations, proportional reasoning, measurement and patterns designed to promote mathematical capacity. Problems are structured in sets of 5, clustered by topic, strategy or big math idea. Each task is slightly more complex than the last to allow for conceptual development over the course of a week. Problem sets can also be used as an intact set of 5, allowing students to choose the problem that is just right for them.
Intended to be used daily, these problems are designed to promote mathematical curiosity and connection-making. The richness comes from the shared discussion and comparison of strategies. The more we share our thinking the smarter we all become!
Check it out at mindfull.ecwid.com.
Stay tuned for the Grades 2-4 version coming soon!
Fair Shares – Teaching Division in Grades 4-7
Hello, all…
I am pleased to announce the publication of my latest teacher resource book called Fair Shares – Teaching Division in Grades 4-7. The book features tasks, games and problems for intermediate aged students focussed on making sense of division.
Through stories, models, pictures and words, students are introduced to the idea of division as sharing and division as grouping. Lessons include opportunities for talk, for exploration and for practice in the form of games and engaging tasks across the grades. The lesson sequences are designed to address division of whole numbers and decimal numbers, to make meaningful connections to fractions and decimals in context and to support students in seeing patterns in quotients. Lessons map out how to use manipulatives to model division situations, and literature connections to introduce great division contexts. Match to the WNCP curriculum, Fair Shares – Teaching Division in Grades 4-7 outlines a range of assessment tools to allow teachers to gather evidence – quickly and without stress on the part of the students – to show what their learners know and can do.
Thank you, as always, for your support.
Carole
Cuisenaire rods ROCK.
Here are some of my favourite Cuisenaire rod tasks for elementary. There are so many cool things to be done with these materials, I can’t begin to delve into it all here, but start with some of these ideas and see what kinds of thinking your students come up with. Remember it’s critical to record the numbers to accompany with your students’ constructions – modelling for them how a mathematician would record their reasoning is so very important. It allows students to formalize their learning and make connections to the “naked math”… (A phrase a dear friend of mine used to use often. Attention-getting, no??)
As well, I’ve uploaded are some Cuisenaire provocations — images to inspire creativity that your younger students may enjoy. To keep the play moving mathematically, try placing one or more of these pictures at the table where students are exploring the materials. You can suggest they might like to try making something like the image, but it’s much more interesting to simply place the image on the table and walk away. Your students will no doubt do something with the picture – and it’s oh-so-fun to observe them in action!
Look around your school for Cuisenaire rods – it’s not unusual to find them stashed away in a cupboard somewhere, forgotten. They are a classic manipulative and one with great possibilities. If you find them and want to figure out ways to use them, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d be happy to provide a workshop for your school staff, or to do a series of demonstration lessons with students across the grades with these versatile materials.
My favourite place to order Cuisenaire rods is through Spectrum Educational. Be sure to get the wooden materials only – they truly demonstrate the relationships in the most compelling way. Here’s a link to a class set of wooden materials from their on-line catalogue. For those of you in the lower mainland of BC, be sure to call Collins Educational — or drop by to pick some up. They’re always happy to help.
Enjoy a lovely weekend.
Carole
Mathematical Thinking 