This unit helps teachers develop students’ understanding of the properties of shapes. Lessons incorporate children’s literature, explore quilt designs, and use manipulative materials to help students investigate how shapes are related to one another, including what happens when shapes are combined or divided.

Math By All Means: Geometry, Grades 1-2

Education & Teaching

Confer, Chris

Schools & Teaching

Math Solutions

Number sense encompasses a wide range of skills, including being able to make estimates and to think and reason flexibly. In these lessons, children investigate number relationships, practice problem solving using landmark numbers, and explore ways to count, compose, and decompose numbers.

Teaching Number Sense, Kindergarten

Number sense encompasses a wide range of skills, including being able to make estimates and to think and reason flexibly. In these lessons, children build their understanding of counting, number relationships, and landmark numbers. They also develop computation strategies, further their understanding of composing and decomposing numbers, and develop a beginning sense of place value.

Teaching Number Sense, Grade 1

In this series, expert teachers share a wealth of classroom-tested lessons that focus on essential measurement concepts in a problem-solving context as well as connect to other strands of the math curriculum and other disciplines, such as literature, social studies, and science. Each lesson is organized in an accessible, easy-to-use format that includes an overview, a list of materials, a vocabulary list, step-by-step teaching directions, and reproducibles. The lessons in Sizing Up Measurement: Activities for Grades 3–5 Classrooms focus on length, area, volume, angles, weight, time, and temperature.

Sizing Up Measurement: Activities for Grades 3-5 Classrooms

Science & Math

Mathematics

During the past two decades, Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez have worked to deepen and improve mathematics instruction at schools around the country. Wherever they go, they find the raw ingredients for success already present: "The potential for positive change lies within each school. Abundance is present in the form of capable children, teachers, coaches, and principals. Potential energy -- what can be -- transforms into kinetic energy—what will be—only when a force is accurately applied to move a school in the right direction."
In Small Steps, Big Changes: Eight Essential Practices for Transforming Schools Through Mathematics, the authors identify eight tested principles that transform what can be an overwhelming process into a set of comprehensible and concrete steps. Each phase of the change process is brought to life through the stories and perspectives of teachers, coaches, and principals—stories that will strike familiar chords for every educator.
When teachers make sense of math, students learn to make sense of math, and that can profoundly change the entire culture of a school. In one vivid illustration, the authors tell the story of Pueblo Gardens Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, where Marco, as principal, and Chris, as instructional coach, worked alongside a group of dedicated teachers. A few years into the change process, Pueblo Gardens -- a school with 96 percent of its students at the poverty level and a high percentage of English language learners -- had 94 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards in third-grade mathematics. Over time, other grades achieved similarly high scores. And once the test scores rose, they were sustained at high levels.

Small Steps, Big Changes

Ramirez, Marco

Routledge

Powerful tools for mathematics instruction can make a good lesson great. Math Tools in Action, an exciting new video series, explores Anchor Charts, Journals, and Manipulatives, three of the most effective tools for helping students understand the Common Core Standards while encouraging them to become critical thinkers. During the past two decades, Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez have worked to deepen and improve math instruction at schools around the country. Now you can watch as they teach and comment on a complete lesson using each of these essential math tools-tools that will help you deepen and improve your own math instruction. Anchor Charts describe the essence of a lesson; they help focus teachers on and remind students of the most important features of the concepts and skills they are currently learning. Anchor charts not only compel teachers to be clear about their instruction, they also improve student comprehension. Watch as Marco leads a fifth-grade class through a lesson on building and decomposing an array, frequently referring to and updating the anchor chart.

Math Tools in Action: Anchor Charts

Stenhouse Pub

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