It is time to expose the secret double life of subtraction. It all comes down to that foundational number sense we work with students to develop as they grow as elementary school mathematicians. We give students the opportunity to build…
The final Books and Big Ideas of the 2025-2026 school year has taken place, and the story so carefully chosen by our incredible Lower School librarian was The Magical Yet by Angela DiTerlizzi. A math educator could not have wished…
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…
Sometimes the best definition is so brief and obvious…if you were to ask me just yesterday how to define fact fluency I would have given you a mouthful of alphabet soup teacher-ese. This morning, over coffee, shuffling through some of…
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…
If you’ve read the previous post on the fundamentals of counting, then subitizing is not news to you. If you haven’t yet, here is a link to that post! Tenzi is one of my favorite at-home-fun-for-everyone games that has a…
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…
In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to take a moment to share part of a TedX talk from Australian math educator Eddie Woo. He shares the most magical explorations of what math is and how it is apparent in…
Data literacy is one of the more important skills we can build in young mathematicians, and one that is very fun to support both in the classroom and at home. There is so much to understand about the world when…
April marks the 30th year of National Poetry Month and with it a new way to explore the math that infuses the beauty of language. What do you think about when you consider how math and poetry might be related?…