IM Certified® Blog
Representing Subtraction of Signed Numbers: Can You Spot the Difference?
By Greta Anderson & Patti Drawdy, IM Certified Facilitator I read the lesson three times through, but was still unsure why the number line below shows $3 - 7$. My aha moment arrived courtesy of the grade 1 standards....
Planning Lessons for a Block Schedule
By Jennifer Wilson and Vanessa Cerrahoglu Update 2021 - August: IM has created block schedule guidance for IM 6-8 Math v.III and IM 9-12 Math v.I. Get unit guidance on how to customize the curriculum to fit your block...
IM K-5 Math: Designing for Each Student
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...
What is Problem-based Instruction?
By William McCallum When I was a child, I used to get puzzle books out of the library. One of the puzzles was the twelve-coin problem, the most difficult of all coin weighing problems. My mother and I worked on it...
Extra Supports for Algebra 1: The Gateway Resources
By Sadie Estrella Illustrative Mathematics’ high school curriculum is scheduled to be released this summer. This is an exciting time for Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 teachers. I honestly am ready to take a job at a...
Realizing the promise of open resources
By William McCallum All of our curriculum here at Illustrative Mathematics is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, which allows anyone to "copy and redistribute the material in any medium or...
Truth and Consequences Revisited
By William McCallum What are extraneous solutions? A while ago I wrote a blog post about solving equations where I talked about seeing the steps in solving equations as logical deductions. Thus the steps \begin{align*}3x +...
What is the Time? It Depends…
Q: What is the fastest way to get a heated debate going about some topic in the IM 6–-8 math curriculum? A: Show people this graph from Lesson 4 in Unit 8.5: By Kristin Umland Many of us learned that time is always the...
What is Multiplication?
Multiplication is vexation, Division is as bad; The Rule of Three doth puzzle me, And Practice drives me mad. (old nursery rhyme.) Some people might answer that multiplication is repeated addition. For example, $5 \times 7$...
The Power of Noticing and Wondering
My first years of teaching, I worried my students looked at me much like Ben Stein as the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I cringe to think about the series of monotonous and leading questions I strung together to a...
Catalyzing Change through the IM Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2 Math
NCTM has called for structural and curricular changes in high school mathematics. Learn about how IM's high school curriculum is aligned with the vision put forth by NCTM to end tracking, implement effective targeted...
Proof in IM’s High School Geometry (A Sneak Preview)
Supporting high-school students to write detailed, precise proofs is challenging. Learn about some of the design elements that IM used to invite students to a deep exploration of proof. In IM’s high school Geometry...
Why is 3 – 5 = 3 + (-5)?
By William McCallum You will never have to subtract again. Students sometimes learn about addition and subtraction of integers using integer chips. These are circular chips, with a yellow chip representing +1 and a red chip...
Professional Learning Through a Fraction Task Progression
Teaching mathematics is a continuous cycle of identifying where each student is in their learning trajectory and determining meaningful ways in which to build on their current understandings. While we...
Engaging All Students in Meaningful Mathematics
“At the end of the day, this wasn’t about focusing on the objective, it was about making the objective meaningful to him.” The work of teaching is both invigorating and challenging. We want to instill a love of math and...
Parent Math Night Using Illustrative Mathematics
Open House night; cue anxiety and sweaty palms! Hope my students’ parents don’t mind. I just began my seventh year of teaching middle school mathematics. Middle school is a limbo land filled with prepubescent pre-teens,...
Planning for Meaningful Practice
There is no shortage of available math resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The difficult and time-consuming job for teachers is weeding through all of the tools to decide which best supports students in...
Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say
By William McCallum In one of our professional development workshops, there is an activity in which the facilitator asks teachers to skip count by $\frac34$. The facilitator records the count, $\frac34$, $\frac64$,...
What is right about wrong answers?
When I first started teaching, at the end of each day, I would open my teacher’s guide, grab my pen, and thumb through the stack of completed worksheets. My eyes would dart quickly from the red answers in the teacher’s...
What I Learned Today: Scale Drawings & Maps
I asked my 15-year-old what she learned today at school. She paused for a moment and then answered, “What did you learn at school today?” It took me a while to think about what I had learned (which will make me more...
The IM Curriculum Changed How I Think About Math Instruction
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...
Planning to Use Pre-Unit Assessments
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...
IM Preparing for the School Year
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....
Building a Supportive Home/School Partnership
By Kristin Gray, Jenna Laib, Sarah Caban Open House. Back-to-School Night. Family Welcome. Math Night. No matter what the name of the event that launches the school year, family members will arrive at your school with the...
Building a Mathematical Classroom Community
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...
Fractions: Units and Equivalence
By William McCallum “I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?” Alice in Wonderland. The idea of equivalence in mathematics is tricky for learners, because when we talk about two things being...
5th Grade: Decimal Place Value
By Kristin Gray There are some standards I think we do such a great job developing in early elementary, but never revisit explicitly when students learn about different numbers such as fractions and decimals. I blogged...
The Intersection of Fraction Talks and Clothesline Math: Formative Assessment and the 5 Practices
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...
The IM 6–8 Math Curriculum Changed My Math Methods Experience
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...
Fun With Zooming Number Lines in Grade 8
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...
Untangling fractions, ratios, and quotients
By William McCallum In everyday language, $\frac{a}{b}$, $a\div b$, and $a : b$ are all different manifestations of a single fused notion. Here, for example are the mathematical definitions of fraction, quotient, and ratio...
On Similar Triangles
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...
NCSM and NCTM 2018 Roundup
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...
Time to Noodle
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...
What is an instructional routine?
By William McCallum and Kate Nowak People use routines for all kinds of things. Routines give structure to time and interactions. People like structure. When a child comes home from school, there might be a routine. She...
Using Math Routines to Build Number Sense in First Grade
By Allison Van Voy When I started teaching four years ago, I had no idea how important number sense was to a student’s math understanding. I was fresh out of college, brand new to teaching, and number sense was not a...
Sometimes the Real World Is Overrated: The Joy of Silly Applications
By Charles Larrieu Casias One of the cool things about math is that it can provide powerful new ways of seeing the world. Just for fun, I want you to open up this lesson from the grade 8 student text. Take a quick skim....
Instructional Materials Matter: Interpreting Remainders in Division
By Jody Guarino We know instructional materials play a key role in student learning experiences but how do we ensure our students are learning from coherent high-quality instructional materials that engage them in critical...
Adapting Curriculum For Students to Know, Use and Enjoy Fractions
By Melissa Greenwald You know it is time for a change when half of the students in class are lost by the third lesson of a new unit. I teach third grade in a charter school in Philadelphia. We use Go Math! and each year I...
Learning Goals and Learning Targets
By Jennifer Wilson One of your students is asked, “What are you learning about today in class?” How does your student respond? “Nothing” “Math” “The questions on this worksheet” “Deciding if two figures are congruent”...
Warm-up Routines With a Purpose
By Kristin Gray As a teacher, curiosity around students’ mathematical thinking was the driving force behind the teaching and learning in my classroom. To better understand what they were thinking, I needed to not only have...
Adapting Problems to Elicit Student Thinking
By Jody Guarino As a teacher, I constantly wonder how I can elicit student thinking in order to gain insight into the current thinking of my students and leverage their thoughts and ideas to build mathematical...
A Fraction Unit Does Not Always Begin With Lesson 1
By Jared Gilman As I sat down at my local coffee shop to plan my upcoming 5th grade unit on fractions, a wave of dread spread across my body. I started having flashbacks to last winter, when my students’ frustrations with...
Why is the graph of a linear function a straight line?
By William McCallum In my last post I wrote about the following standard, and mentioned that I could write a whole blog post about the first comma. 8.F.A.3. Interpret the equation $y = mx + b$ as defining a linear function,...
Why We Don’t Cross Multiply
By Kate Nowak (co-authored with Kristin Gray) “Ultimately, the goal of this unit is to prepare students to make sense of situations involving equivalent ratios and solve problems flexibly and strategically, rather than to...
The Illustrative Mathematics Team Reflect on the 5 Practices
The entire Illustrative Mathematics team spends a lot of time reading about teaching and learning. Most recently, we have been reading—some of us rereading—and reflecting on the 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive...
Using the 5 Practices with Instructional Routines
By Robin Moore As a coach, how can I help teachers structure their lesson-planning in order for students to unpack their mathematical understandings? This question is always at the forefront of my mind as I reflect on my...
Vocabulary Decisions
By Bowen Kerins A wide-ranging team worked together to develop the Illustrative Mathematics Grades 6–8 Math curriculum. Many of the authors were and are experienced teachers of Grades 6–8, while others are experienced high...
How the 5 Practices Changed my Instruction
By Alicia Farmer I am the type of teacher you want on your teaching team. I am the person that can remember vast amounts of details, predict potential obstacles, and meet any and all deadlines. My organized personality is...
The 5 Practices Framework: Explicit Planning vs Explicit Teaching
“Whether we’re asking students to analyze a historical event, reflect on a text, or work toward a scientific discovery, we need to give students a chance to dig into the ideas on their own first.” By Kristin Gray I’ve come...
Not all contexts have the same purpose
By Nik Doran We sometimes use familiar contexts to understand new mathematical ideas, and sometimes we use familiar mathematical ideas to understand what is going on in a context. We do both of these things by looking for...
Welcome to the new Illustrative Mathematics blog!
In continually moving forward with our vision of creating a world where learners know, use and enjoy mathematics, the Illustrative Mathematics team is so excited to announce the launch of our official blog! Our blog will be...
Info Gap Cards: The Hidden Gem
By Sadie Estrella May 2016 seems so long ago. I actually had to look it up on a calendar because I really thought it was more than 1.41666years ago. That was when I officially started this journey with Illustrative...
Fraction & Decimal Number Lines
By Kristin Gray Recently, our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers had the opportunity to chat math for 2 hours during a Learning Lab held on a professional development day. It was the first time we had done a vertical lab and...
Respecting the Intellectual Work of the Grade
By Kate Nowak A thing that I think we did really well in Illustrative Mathematics 6–8 Math was attend carefully to really deep, important things that adults that already know math can easily overlook. For example,...
Assessment Principles in Illustrative Mathematics 6-8 Math
By Bowen Kerins A wide-ranging team worked together to develop the Illustrative Mathematics Grades 6-8 Math curriculum. As Assessment Lead, it was my responsibility to write and curate the Shared Understandings...
Reflection & Discussions in Grade 8, Part 1
By Ashli Black Woo, blogging! As I start work on high school curriculum, I thought I would go back and revisit the grade 8 units that I’ve spent the past 18 months working on and share some of my favorite things. This gives...
Fraction division part I: How do you know when it is division?
By William McCallum and Kristin Umland In her book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, Liping Ma wrote about this question and how teachers responded to it: Write a story problem for $1 ¾ \div ½$. [Pause here and...
Truth and consequences: talking about solving equations
By William McCallum The language we use when we talk about solving equations can be a bit of a minefield. It seems obvious to talk about an equation such as $3x + 2 = x + 5$ as saying that $3x+2$ is equal to $x + 5$, and...
Ways of thinking and ways of doing
By William McCallum Somewhere back in days of Facebook fury about the Common Core there was a post from an outraged parent whose child had been marked wrong for something like this: $$ 6 \times 3 = 6 + 6 + 6 = 18. $$...
Misconceptions about Multiple Methods
By William McCallum You may have noticed that I am back to publishing regular blog posts! My goal for now is a blog post every second Wednesday. I am now also trying to answer forum questions promptly. I want to thank the...
The Structure is the Standards
Co-authored by Bill McCallum, Jason Zimba, Phil Daro You have just purchased an expensive Grecian urn and asked the dealer to ship it to your house. He picks up a hammer, shatters it into pieces, and explains that he will...