by Susan Jo Russell | Mar 9, 2020 |
In a blog post over a year ago, I wrote about the importance of using story contexts to support students in developing mental images of the operations. In that post, I concluded: “Along with pictures, drawings, diagrams, equations, and physical models, story contexts...
by Megan Murray | Feb 17, 2020 |
What follows is a lightly edited version of the second part of an end-of-Kindergarten discussion about the teen numbers. In Part 1, students took up the question of whether 100 is a teen number. That conversation built on a previous one, about why there are so many 1s...
by Megan Murray | Feb 11, 2020 |
Not long after I witnessed a Kindergarten conversation about why there are so many 1s in the teen numbers, I visited the same classroom. This time, it was Nicole who asked a question that knocked my socks off. “I wonder if 100 is a teen number?” When I asked why she...
by Annie Sussman | Dec 2, 2019 |
In conversations about differentiation, strategies to scaffold learning for students who need more support, and strategies to extend the learning for students who are ready for more challenge often come up. One topic that is rarely considered however, is the...
by Arusha Hollister | Nov 18, 2019 |
Many of us were taught to “estimate” in elementary school. Maybe we were asked how many jellybeans there were in a jar. Or asked to round before finding the answer to a computation problem. But for many of us there was little connection between those activities and...
by Megan Murray | Oct 28, 2019 |
Last spring, I visited a Kindergarten classroom near the end of the year. Students were participating in a Math Workshop focused on the teen numbers, choosing among activities that asked them to identify and recognize teen numbers; to represent them in several...
by The Investigations 3 Center Team | Apr 29, 2019 |
Six of our staff traveled to San Diego to attend the NCSM and NCTM conferences at the beginning of April. Below are four staff members’ reflections on a session that stood out to them. (Read the first three here.) Keith: “The Iris Carl Equity Address: Equity and...
by The Investigations 3 Center Team | Apr 22, 2019 |
Six of our staff traveled to San Diego to attend the NCSM and NCTM conferences at the beginning of April. Below are three staff members’ reflections on a session that stood out to them. Four more to follow next time. Keith: “From Oakland to Wakanda: Transforming...
by Arusha Hollister | Feb 4, 2019 |
In my years of leading in-person and online professional development, the idea of teaching students that certain “key words” signify a particular operation (e.g. “altogether means add”) often comes up when discussing story problems. People also generally see the power...
by Keith Cochran | Jan 22, 2019 |
Question: Why was the work with percents taken out of the 5th grade curriculum in the 3rd edition? Answer: In the 1st and 2nd editions of Investigations, there was a unit (Name that Portion and What’s That Portion?) that included lessons that connected what 5th...
