This article describes how fortuitous mathematical moments should be noticed, encouraged, embraced, and capitalized upon.
Browse
Megan H. Wickstrom
Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.
Rick Anderson and Peter Wiles
Recognizing the complex nature of students’ geometric reasoning, we present guidelines and suggestions for implementing a Guess My Shape minilesson that focuses students’ attention on properties and attributes of geometric shapes.
Amanda K. Riske, Catherine E. Cullicott, Amanda Mohammad Mirzaei, Amanda Jansen, and James Middleton
We introduce the Into Math Graph tool, which students use to graph how “into" mathematics they are over time. Using this tool can help teachers foster conversations with students and design experiences that focus on engagement from the student’s perspective.
Amber G. Candela, Melissa D. Boston, and Juli K. Dixon
We discuss how discourse actions can provide students greater access to high quality mathematics. We define discourse actions as what teachers or students say or do to elicit student contributions about a mathematical idea and generate ongoing discussion around student contributions. We provide rubrics and checklists for readers to use.
Over the past 100 years, technology has evolved in unprecedented fashion. Calculators, computers, and smart phones have become ubiquitous, yet school mathematics experiences for many children still remain without many powerful technological tools for the exploration of mathematics. We consider the evolution of some tools as we imagine a future.
Odd Shape Out
big solutions to little problems
Jo Ann Cady and Pamela Wells
Solutions to a previous Solve It problem are discussed, and the procedures used with problem solving are explored.
Matt B. Roscoe and Joe Zephyrs
Pull on the threads of congruence and similarity in a series of lessons that explores transformational geometry.
Lynn Mitzel and Mark Spanier
When it was released in the mid-1980s, Tetris jump-started the video game craze, but many students of the current generation have never even seen this game, much less played it. Now, with the flood of mobile device applications, Tetris has made a comeback, and today's students have a chance to use it, too. We have found Tetris to be an engaging tool for high school geometry students to apply an isometry in context and to learn the composition of isometries. The game allows a player to rotate and translate moving pieces to create full rows anywhere on the screen.
A set of problems of many types.
