Growing up we usually think we are either a math person or not a math person. But, in preparing for this year I saw a picture that said ‘How to be a math person: Step 1: Do math Step 2: Be a person’ and I really started to look at math differently. I’ve been teaching...
Time to start a new unit! What do you need to know before your students enter the room? NCTM’s Principles to Actions names several productive beliefs about assessments that will promote mathematical success for all. At the top of the list is that the “primary purpose...
There are always so many things to do in preparation for a new school year. At this point of the summer, to-do lists start getting made, materials get purchased, rooms are organized, and math class planning begins. Whether you are using the IM 6–8 Math...
Classroom environments that foster a sense of community that allows students to express their mathematical ideas—together with norms that expect students to communicate their mathematical thinking to their peers and teacher, both orally and in writing, using the...
By Jenna Laib My sixth graders are weary of pre-assessments. No matter how many times we discuss the goal of a pre-assessment–for me to learn more about their current strategies and understandings, so that I can design learning experiences that fit them better–all of...
By Anna Polsgrove When I first started the Math Methods course at University of California, Irvine, all of my ideas on how to learn math took a complete 180. During the first two months, a million questions swirled in my head as I worked through problems with my...
By Charles Larrieu Casias The number line is an anchor representation that threads through the entire middle school curriculum. For this blog post, I want to focus on a creative use of the number line in grade 8 to explore scientific notation and irrational numbers....
By Ashli Black The fact that a line has a well-defined slope—that the ratio between the rise and run for any two points on the line is always the same—depends on similar triangles. (p.12, 6–8 Progression on Expressions and Equations) As students are building their...
It was great to see so many of you at NCSM and NCTM. If we missed you, or you weren’t able to attend, read our NCSM and NCTM round-up below. We enjoyed the conversations we had with those of you that are using the IM 6–8 Math curriculum and are looking forward to High...
By Kate Nowak This task is the first part of the culminating lesson of unit 2 in grade 8, which is about dilations and similarity. (You will need to create a free teacher account to open the link.) It is a variation on the popular “use shadows and similar triangles to...
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