This math is… different…
Sometimes the math looks different from what most of us remember, and if you’ve sat down to help with homework lately, you know exactly what I mean. You come to the table ready to be useful, and the page is…
Notes from the Classroom
What real learning looks like: student thinking, classroom moments, and the reasoning behind how we teach. Out of the mouths of babes…
On Making Mistakes in Math
A true story “My dad says mistakes are good,” a second grader shared. “He said they help you learn.” We were discussing the importance of giving hard things a try, even if we don’t always succeed. “It is sort of…
Why Seekers & Solvers?
A note on the name of this blog. I listened to the most beautiful description of what we want to build in mathematicians several weeks ago. A brilliant colleague of mine (Pete Prince, to be specific, who is co-head of…
Flexible Multiplication: The Associative Property
Today we briefly talked about something I’m not going to name for the students just yet, because we are still playing! We’re on a cliffhanger until Monday. We left this unresolved for now… What I can tell you is that…
“Use The Math You Know”
“Use the math you know.” It is one of my most important mantras. In fact, I rarely have to say it anymore. When I review an upcoming homework assignment with my students, and we come to a tricky looking or…
Making Connections and Asking “Why?”
When a student is used to scrutinizing the values she is working with, the connections emerge. Often the kids are so excited to share the connections they’ve made that they annotate their math homework or burst into an excited monologue…
“What would you tell a first grader?”
This is what I asked my second graders when reviewing their homework assignment, which included a question asking them to choose one of three basic addition facts and one of three basic subtraction facts that they found interesting or perhaps…
Two Dice
How many dots do you see? HOW do you see them? This image appears in our Kindergarten curriculum as part of something called a “dot talk.” This is an opportunity for students to see math as something that is perceived…