Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4-5


Book Description

Detailed plans for helping elementary students experience deep mathematical learning Do you work tirelessly to make your math lessons meaningful, challenging, accessible, and engaging? Do you spend hours you don’t have searching for, adapting, and creating tasks to provide rich experiences for your students that supplement your mathematics curriculum? Help has arrived! Classroom Ready-Rich Math Tasks for Grades 4-5 details more than 50 research- and standards-aligned, high-cognitive-demand tasks that will have your students doing deep-problem-based learning. These ready-to-implement, engaging tasks connect skills, concepts and practices, while encouraging students to reason, problem-solve, discuss, explore multiple solution pathways, connect multiple representations, and justify their thinking. They help students monitor their own thinking and connect the mathematics they know to new situations. In other words, these tasks allow students to truly do mathematics! Written with a strengths-based lens and an attentiveness to all students, this guide includes: • Complete task-based lessons, referencing mathematics standards and practices, vocabulary, and materials • Downloadable planning tools, student resource pages, and thoughtful questions, and formative assessment prompts • Guidance on preparing, launching, facilitating, and reflecting on each task • Notes on access and equity, focusing on students’ strengths, productive struggle, and distance or alternative learning environments. With concluding guidance on adapting or creating additional rich tasks for your students, this guide will help you give all of your students the deepest, most enriching and engaging mathematics learning experience possible.




Powerful Problem Solving


Book Description

How can we break the cycle of frustrated students who "drop out of math" because the procedures just don't make sense to them? Or who memorize the procedures for the test but don't really understand the mathematics? Max Ray-Riek and his colleagues at the Math Forum @ Drexel University say "problem solved," by offering their collective wisdom about how students become proficient problem solvers, through the lens of the CCSS for Mathematical Practices. They unpack the process of problem solving in fresh new ways and turn the Practices into activities that teachers can use to foster habits of mind required by the Common Core: communicating ideas and listening to the reflections of others estimating and reasoning to see the "big picture" of a problem organizing information to promote problem solving using modeling and representations to visualize abstract concepts reflecting on, revising, justifying, and extending the work. Powerful Problem Solving shows what's possible when students become active doers rather than passive consumers of mathematics. Max argues that the process of sense-making truly begins when we create questioning, curious classrooms full of students' own thoughts and ideas. By asking "What do you notice? What do you wonder?" we give students opportunities to see problems in big-picture ways, and discover multiple strategies for tackling a problem. Self-confidence, reflective skills, and engagement soar, and students discover that the goal is not to be "over and done," but to realize the many different ways to approach problems. Read a sample chapter.




50 Problem-solving Lessons


Book Description

Offers practical, classroom-tested ideas for helping students learn mathematics through problem solving.




How to Solve it


Book Description

"Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be "reasoned" out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams."--Back cover.




Problem Solving in All Seasons, Grades 3-5


Book Description

Holidays and seasonal activities provide excitement and a change of pace for teachers and students alike. They also offer perfect backdrops for mathematical tasks that can be related to other topics and themes in the classroom. Problem Solving in All Seasons, Grades 3-5 delivers thirty-six appealing, real-world situations, arranged in grade-level order, to engage young learners in mathematical tasks.




Principles to Actions


Book Description

This text offers guidance to teachers, mathematics coaches, administrators, parents, and policymakers. This book: provides a research-based description of eight essential mathematics teaching practices ; describes the conditions, structures, and policies that must support the teaching practices ; builds on NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics and supports implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics to attain much higher levels of mathematics achievement for all students ; identifies obstacles, unproductive and productive beliefs, and key actions that must be understood, acknowledged, and addressed by all stakeholders ; encourages teachers of mathematics to engage students in mathematical thinking, reasoning, and sense making to significantly strengthen teaching and learning.




Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions


Book Description

Describes five practices for productive mathematics discussions, including anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting.







Comprehending Problem Solving


Book Description

Nationally recognized mathematics educator and author Art Hyde takes a culminating look at his thirty years of experience working with teachers and students to answer the question: In the Common Core era, what are the most successful practices for helping children solve mathematical problems with deep understanding? The key, he argues, is providing positive experiences with meaningful mathematics centered around rich activities. When students are given the opportunity to wrestle with appropriately difficult activities based on real life situations and intriguing contexts, they become excited about the math and willingly tackle problems with more zeal and accuracy than ever before. The result is deeper understanding of the content and greater skill at doing mathematics. Art draws on extensive research on how children learn and the relationship between reading and mathematical comprehension. His braided model of problem solving in which cognition, language, and mathematics are woven together intentionally forms the basis of math activities that he and numerous elementary teachers around the country have used. Look into the classrooms of some of these math teachers in this book, as they share their success stories illustrating the rewards of using these activities to foster deep mathematical understanding. Arthur Hyde is a professor of mathematics education at National Louis University, where he received its Excellence in Teaching award. While teaching high school mathematics in Philadelphia, he developed a variety of creative methods for teaching math. He also obtained a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Pennsylvania, where he later directed its teacher-education programs. He has worked frequently in elementary classrooms, conducting extensive professional development programs on teaching mathematics and math problem solving in Chicago and its surrounding school districts. His previous books include: Best Practice, Fourth Edition (coauthored with Steven Zemelman and Harvey Daniels), Understanding Middle School Math, and Comprehending Math.




Introduction to Problem Solving, Second Edition, Grades 3-5


Book Description

NCTM's Process Standards were designed to support teaching that helps children develop independent, effective mathematical thinking. The books in the Heinemann Math Process Standards Series give every elementary teacher the opportunity to explore each one of the standards in depth. And with language and examples that don't require prior math training to understand, the series offers friendly, reassuring advice to any teacher preparing to embrace the Process Standards. In the second edition of Introduction to Problem Solving, Susan O'Connell updates her popular and easy-to-use guide. O'Connell eases you into problem solving, giving you an array of entry points for understanding, planning, and teaching; strategies that help students develop mathematical thinking; and a wealth of all-new activities that are modifiable for immediate use with students of all levels. Written by a veteran teacher for teachers of every level of experience, Introduction to Problem Solving fosters a new awareness of the importance of problem solving and highlights ways to implement it without rewriting your curriculum. Best of all, like all the titles in the Math Process Standards Series, Introduction to Problem Solving comes with two powerful tools to help you get started and plan well: online resources with activities customizable to match your lessons and a correlation guide that helps you match mathematical content with the processes it utilizes. If problem solving is a problem you'd like to solve. Or if you're simply looking for new ways to work the problem-solving standards into your curriculum, read, dog-ear, and teach with Introduction to Problem Solving, Second Edition. And if you'd like to learn about any of NCTM's process standards, or if you're looking for new, classroom-tested ways to address them in your math teaching, look no further than Heinemann's Math Process Standards Series. You'll find them explained in the most understandable and practical way: from one teacher to another.




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