2022 was a remarkable year of growth and achievement at IM. Our employees are energetic, inspired, and committed to our vision of a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. I couldn't be more proud of what...
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Counting on Counting Collections
Dec 14, 2022
By Sara Baranauskas, IM Lead Curriculum Writer, Grade 1 and IM Certified® Facilitator Counting Collections is an engaging and playful mathematical routine that supports and builds students’ sense of mathematical identity...
Strategies for Instituting Equitable Math Instruction
Oct 18, 2022
Dionne Aminata, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Marketing, Illustrative Mathematics Rolanda Baldwin, Vice President of Mathematics, UnboundEd Illustrative Mathematics and UnboundEd both agree that achieving racial...
Illustrative Mathematics and IM Certified Partners featured at NCSM and NCTM 2022
Oct 12, 2022
Members of the Illustrative Mathematics team recently attended two national conferences for math educators: NCSM (Sept 26–28, 2022) in Anaheim, CA, and NCTM (Sept 28–Oct 1, 2022) in Los Angeles. We enjoyed meeting so many...
Making IM Centers Work: Joyful Practice, Meaningful Fluency, and Authentic Assessment
Jun 13, 2022
By Maureen D. O’Connell “How is it going with your implementation of IM K–5 Math Centers?” That’s my favorite question to ask during professional learning for IM K–5 Math. The response is a pedagogical temperature check...
The Story of Grade 3
May 24, 2022
By Mike Henderson As a former grade 3 teacher, I know first hand how daunting teaching math at this level can be. On top of developing fluency with addition and subtraction within 1,000, students need to learn about new...
The Story of Grade 2
May 5, 2022
By Mike Henderson Teaching addition and subtraction in grade 2 is a challenging balancing act. As students move from numbers within 100 to numbers within 1,000, they need to use approaches that involve directly representing...
Towards Coherence
Apr 13, 2022
By William McCallum Last week, we had our first large-scale in-person event in quite a while, a training for new and returning facilitators in Baltimore, with over 110 facilitators and 13 employees attending. I gave a...
IM Curriculum Provides Everything but the Kitchen Sink Needed for Lesson Planning
Mar 30, 2022
By Liza Bondurant, IM Certified® Facilitator/Associate Professor Do you spend hours hunting down materials for your lesson plans? How can you be sure the materials are aligned to your standards? How can you make your lesson...
Math Language Routines: Discourse with a Purpose
Feb 17, 2022
By Dr. Kristen Taylor, IM Certified® Facilitator Math teachers can talk all day about math! We get super excited when we encounter someone else who enjoys these conversations as well. But too many of our students don't get...
Revisiting Distance Learning with IM K–12 Math™
Jan 18, 2022
With the surge of the Omicron variant, many schools are moving back to distance learning. Although we may not be excited to leave our classrooms again, we are better prepared for distance learning this time around. Most, if...
Taking the Long View
Jan 11, 2022
By William McCallum A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a 17-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. We descended through the layers of rock, from the 270 million year old Kaibab sedimentary layer of chert, dolomite,...
In the Beginning: Unit 1 in Kindergarten
Dec 7, 2021
By Alex Clayton When was the last time you stepped into an entirely new environment? You weren’t sure exactly what was going to happen. There was no one you recognized. How did you feel: Uncertain? Anxious? Hopeful? During...
Illustrative Mathematics Celebrates 10 Years: Letter from the CEO
Dec 1, 2021
2021 marks our 10th anniversary at Illustrative Mathematics, and we couldn’t be more proud to have impacted so many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and families since our humble beginnings in 2011. Our business...
Remembering Bob Moses
Nov 3, 2021
By William McCallum and Kristin Umland "Math literacy will be a liberation tool for people trying to get out of poverty and the best hope for people trying not to get left behind.” —Bob Moses, 1935–2021 Bob Moses, the civil...
Together Apart: Amplifying the “Gift of Student Thinking” in Distance Learning with IM
Oct 26, 2021
By Maureen D. O’Connell, IM K–5 Math™ Pilot Teacher,IM Certified® Facilitator for IM K–5 Math “The more intensely interested a teacher is in a student’s thinking, the more interested the student becomes in his or her own...
Unlocking Learners’ Thinking Using the Mathematical Language Routines
Oct 5, 2021
By IM Certified Facilitators, Cheryl Fricchione and Rachel Rundstrom Consider this:A child whose primary language isn’t English does not participate in the classroom to the degree that their English-speaking peers do....
FASTalk: Activating the Power of Families to Support Mathematics
Sep 28, 2021
By Elisabeth O’Bryon, co-founder and Chief Impact Officer at Family Engagement Lab and Megan Lorio, Managing Editor at Family Engagement Lab Engaging families in meaningful and equitable ways is a cornerstone of student...
Choosing Math Tools and Representations that Work:
“100 chart-less in Grade 2”
Sep 20, 2021
By Maureen D. O’Connell, Math Specialist Some math tools and representations help students solve in-the-moment problems. Other math tools and representations help students solve problems and grow their conceptual...
Multi-grade Classrooms and
IM K–5 Math™
Sep 8, 2021
By Jen Hawkins, IM Facilitator and IM K-5 Product Specialist Illustrative Mathematics believes that students can achieve success as mathematical thinkers by working through problems and consolidating their learning through...
Introducing the IM Implementation Reflection Tool
Aug 30, 2021
by Liz Ramirez, Director of Implementation “This makes the expectations for what I need to change visible.” “It’s not about the tool. It’s about the conversation using the tool.” Quotes from leaders who participated in IM’s...
A Love for Math Reignited
Jul 26, 2021
By Michael Ramirez, Senior Coordinator of School Transformation, Elementary Math When I began school as a kindergartener, I absolutely adored math. As a lower elementary school student, I remember relatives asking me what...
IM K–5 Math: An End and a Beginning
Jul 13, 2021
By William McCallum On March 20, 2015, I received the following email: Thank you for submitting your proposals to the K–12 OER Collaborative. We are pleased to advise you that Illustrative Mathematics has been selected as a...
Culturally Responsive Teaching and Math
Jun 30, 2021
By Asya Howlette, Director of Mathematics and Science at Thurgood Marshall Raise your hand if you have been perplexed by professional learning that told you your class needs to be culturally responsive, but left you...
Fluency Development Within and Across the Grades in IM K–5 Math™, part 4: Multiplication and Division
Jun 7, 2021
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer“Some students are never given the opportunity to engage with mathematics in rich and meaningful ways that emphasize critical thinking and problem...
Fluency Development Within and Across the Grades in IM K–5 Math™, part 3: Multiplication and Division
Jun 1, 2021
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer “The idea of being a ‘math person’ is based on two pervasive world views; first, the so-called ‘fixed’ mindset, that what one knows about math...
Fluency Development Within and Across the Grades in IM K-5 Math™, part 2: Addition and Subtraction
Apr 27, 2021
By Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer and Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer"We have to break from the notion that learning mathematics must be a linear and procedural endeavor mastered through rote practice and...
Fluency Development Within and Across the Grades in IM K–5 Math™, part 1: Addition and Subtraction
Apr 20, 2021
By Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer and Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead WriterWhen do students practice their math facts? How is math fluency assessed?”—current and prospective IM K-5 Math™ teachers everywhere We...
The Joy of Fluency
Apr 5, 2021
By William McCallum I'm not a very good skier, but I have once or twice in my life experienced the joy of a perfect run: gliding down the slopes, taking each turn with confidence. And I've had terrible runs where I...
A Circumference By Any Other Name…
Mar 31, 2021
By Becca Phillips You can’t tell a child “there’s no such thing as monsters” because, well, then, why is there a word for it? I was given this advice when my own daughter was an infant, but I’ve thought a lot about it over...
Creating Time and Space for Students to Develop Foundational Mathematical Ideas
Nov 16, 2020
By Maureen D. O'Connell “Slow down, you’re moving too fast, you got to make the morning last...” When we consider early childhood mathematics this familiar song comes to mind. In our hurried society where more is more,...
Making Sense of Story Problems
Oct 27, 2020
by Deborah Peart, Grade 2 Lead Many people have an aversion to word problems. They cringe at the mention of them. In elementary classrooms, teachers often report that this is what their students struggle with most. When...
Helping Elementary Students Cultivate a Strong Math Community
Aug 18, 2020
by LaToya Byrd and Jenna Laib School looks different this year. It’s easy to focus on the changes that will need to be made—the new practices, the new routines, the new technologies—but we must first focus on our central...
K–5 Curriculum Design Features that Support Equity and Inclusion
Feb 29, 2020
By Dionne Aminata Before I joined the K–5 curriculum writing team at IM, I was a K–8 regional math content specialist for a public charter organization that largely consisted of Title I schools, or schools receiving federal...
Storytelling in the IM K-5 Math Curriculum
Jun 4, 2019
By Kristin Gray, Director of K–5 Curriculum & Professional Learning Curriculum "An excellent mathematics program includes a curriculum that develops important mathematics along coherent learning progressions and...
IM K-5 Math: Designing for Each Student
Feb 26, 2019
By Noelle Conforti Preszler and Kristin Gray In the following activity, think about the students in your classroom. How might each respond? What do you notice? What do you wonder? This activity is the drafted warm-up of the...
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RECENT POSTS
- Centers in Kindergarten: Purposeful Play and Authentic Assessment January 25, 2023
- Representations in the Story of Mathematics January 11, 2023
- Looking back at 2022: Year-End Closeout Message from Bill McCallum December 20, 2022
- Counting on Counting Collections December 14, 2022
- Help Students Know, Use, and Enjoy Quadratics November 17, 2022
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