By Tabitha Eutsler, 3rd Grade Teacher “I’m not sure this is working. Only five of my students are participating and commenting each day. The rest sit there and look at me.” This was my conversation with our math coordinator...
While families arrive with different school experiences and perspectives on what “doing math” means, they often share common questions: “What do I need to know to set my child up for success in math this year?” and “How can...
Jennifer Wilson, Senior Director, Implementation Portfolio When teachers are curious about and trust student thinking to drive learning, they create classrooms where students learn mathematics by making sense of problems,...
By Claire Neely, Senior Implementation Specialist Illustrative Mathematics’ redesigned IMplementation Reflection Tool (IRT) is a powerful, non-evaluative resource intended to shape the way your school adopts and implements...
By Meredith Dadigan Abel, K-5 IM Certified® Facilitator When teachers come back from summer break, there is a magical feeling in the air. For me, it’s like the feeling that accompanies the first snowfall of the season....
By Jen Hawkins, IM Certified® Facilitator and Independent Curriculum Implementation Specialist As I sat at the table in the back of the room, I watched the teacher reveal an image connected to the lesson’s warm-up. She told...
By the IM Team And just like that, school is back in session! Whether you are implementing the IM curriculum for the first time or getting a fresh start as you experience year two or three, the beginning of the year is the...
By the IM Team As summer winds down, we understand that you are not rushing toward the finish line of your summer break. Hopefully, there have been many lazy days, trips or adventures, and time spent with family and...
By Eric Partridge, IM Certified® Facilitator I don’t have many memories from elementary school. The one memory I have from elementary math is from playing Around the World. The object of this game was to answer a...
By Meredith Dadigan Abel, IM Certified® Facilitator It is magical to be in a classroom with a strong math community. In this classroom, the brilliance of all students prevails. Students and teachers share a unanimous belief...
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...
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...
By Sonja Twedt, IM Certified® Facilitator, 6–12 Special Projects Course Assistant Are you an instructional coach or teacher leader in a district that is adopting Illustrative Mathematics? If so, you’ve likely found yourself...
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...
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...
By Patti Drawdy and Yenche Tioanda “Why not start the year with place value?” Kaneka Turner, Grade 4 Lead Writer, hears this question often. Isn’t making sense of and operating on large numbers pretty essential in grade 4?...
By Vanessa Cerrahoglu and Danielle Seabold, IM Certified® Facilitators Learners have brilliant mathematical ideas. How we teachers use IM 6–12 Math™ impacts how often students and teachers recognize this brilliance....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
By Elham Kazemi, Co-Author of Intentional Talk and Professor at University of Washington “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to...
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...
by Janaki Nagarajan How can we best do mathematics together in an online environment? When school suddenly shifted online last spring, I found myself overwhelmed by the learning curve for new technologies—for both myself...
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...
Does the perfect elementary math curriculum exist? Armed with a growth mindset and the Alpha IM K–5 curriculum, teachers in Ipswich Public Schools push their thinking to reach all mathematicians. By Maureen D. O’Connell I...
Establishing norms is critical to creating an environment where all students see themselves as knowers and doers of mathematics. Reflecting on the Illustrative Mathematics mission statement, Creating a world where learners...
This blog post is the fourth in a series of four blog posts exploring the student experience of problem-based learning. The first three posts are available here: (1) “How Do Students Perceive Problem-Based Learning?” (2)...
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...
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