Equality is a hugely important concept in math, and that begins with truly understanding the equal sign. Today I’m sharing with you a mini-lesson that can be used for whole-class instruction or at your small group table and incorporates productive struggle,...
Do you wonder where fact families are found in the current standards? The fact is, current standards don’t actually mention fact families at all anymore. Instead, they refer to “the relationship between operations.” An understanding of this...
One of the perks of being a math instructional coach is that you get to visit classrooms on a daily basis. On one of those visits, I observed this 1st-grade number of the day routine using ten frames. The daily routine begins by showing the number of the day (which is...
As a young girl, I briefly took gymnastics lessons. Anybody else? I have to admit that I was not very flexible—I couldn’t do a smooth backward roll to save my life! That said, one of my favorite Olympic events is the gymnastics competition. Every four years,...
Composing and decomposing numbers is critical learning for Kindergarteners and 1st Graders. This is something that needs to be practiced all year long as students master the combinations first for 5, then 6, then 7, etc. And, of course, they won’t all progress...
