Sara Van Der Werf is a teacher in Minnesota, who has been teaching middle school and high school students for the past 24 years. She writes about teaching on her highly-recommended blog. For the past three years, Sara has collected photographs of math mistakes taken from everyday life, both from the world around her and from the internet. The mistakes come from stores, signs, newspapers, TV, advertisements, etc.). Continue reading Examine Math Mistakes from Our Everyday Lives
One of the most common questions we hear from math teachers is “Where can I find good problems for my students?”. There are more than a dozen sites reviewed on CollectEdNY that answer that question but we are really excited to share MathMemos which, like CollectEdNY, is entirely focused on adult education math teachers and students. Continue reading Bring Math and Student Thinking Alive in the Adult Ed Classroom
Which One Doesn’t Belong? (WODB) is a website with a very simple concept. It is “dedicated to providing thought-provoking puzzles for math teachers and students alike”. Basically, it presents four of something and you have to come up with a reason why each one of the four things doesn’t belong. But it is far more than a collection of brain teasers.
One way we can help students develop different ways of thinking in math is to have them work on activities where they have to classify mathematical objects. Continue reading Learning through classification: What makes this number (or shape or graph) different from the others?
“So I’m there on the beach with my friend Ben when we notice a taco cart up the road. Ben wants to walk straight over, but I’m thinking we walk a lot slower in the sand than we do on the street. So I say we walk straight to the street and then down the street to the cart. So we went our separate ways…” Thus begins the first Three-Act math task I ever experienced, courtesy of Dan Meyer.
Continue reading Inspiring Student Curiosity (or What’s “Real” about Real-world Math?)
A Number Talk is a brief activity teachers can do with students to help build their computational fluency, number sense and their mathematical reasoning. They don’t need to be longer than 5-15 minutes and they can be done with students at any level.
Continue reading Mental Math to Increase Student Computational Fluency and Number Sense