This article shares the importance of giving K-12 students opportunities to develop spatial sense. We explain how we designed Quick Blocks as an activity to engage our students in both spatial reasoning and number sense. Several examples of students thinking are shared as well as a classroom dialogue.
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Molly Rawding
Postscript items are designed as rich grab-and-go resources that any teacher can quickly incorporate into his or her classroom repertoire with little effort and maximum impact. Quick images are a fun, engaging way for students to compose and decompose visual numbers. Students apply their understanding of subitizing–the ability to recognize a number of items without counting–as they determine the quantity of the group
Math for Real: The Top Speed for Humans
“when will I ever use this?”
Alessandra King
The running speed of athletes provides the real-life tie-in to this computation activity.
Ji-Eun Lee
Prospective teachers explore Egyptian multiplication and Russian peasant multiplication to address the quantitative and qualitative relationships underlying these algorithms.
Casey Hord and Samantha Marita
Support math conversations and teach students to approach various problem-solving tasks by encouraging the use of tables.
Solve It!: Parts of a Parallelogram
little problems with big solutions
Sherry L. Bair and JoAnn Cady
To elicit creative student thinking, this open-ended problem asks solvers to calculate the ratio of areas of a parallelogram.
Debra I. Johanning and James D. Mamer
Developing number and operation sense associated with fraction division is viewed from multiple perspectives: modeling, equivalence, and symbolism.
Solve It! Student Thinking: Aunt Martha's Cupcakes
big solutions to little problems
Sherry L. Bair and Edward S. Mooney
Solutions to a February 2013 Solve It! problem are discussed, and the procedures used with problem solving are explored.
Juli K. Dixon and Jennifer M. Tobias
Anticipate and address errors that arise when fractions are placed in context and illustrated with models.
Sherri Ann Cianca
Communicating reasoning and constructing models fold nicely into a geometry activity involving the building of nesting boxes.
