IM Certified® Blog
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 popular “use shadows and similar triangles to...
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 expects a snack, homework time, play time,...
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 concept I had learned in my math courses. In my...
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. What do you notice? What do you wonder? When...
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 thinking and provide opportunities to “do...
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 have followed Chapter 8: Understand Fractions,...
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” During class, one of your students asks you, “Is...
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 great, accessible problems but also create...
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 understandings for the class. First, I need a task that...
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 fractions led to daily meltdowns. Looking back...
