instructional strategies
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IEP and the General Ed Curriculum – Keep Your Eye on the Ball
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Introduction to Unit Rate using Unit Cost
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Introduction to Unit Cost (Unit Rate)
Unit rate (e.g., hamburger meat on sale for $2.39 per pound or you make $13 per hour) is an incredibly important topic in middle and high school. First, unit rates and unit costs are common in life. Second, in the Common Core State Standards math categories you can see that Ratios and Proportions (which includes…
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Addressing Multiplication as a Gap
There is a delineated sequence for teaching multiplication over the years, including repeated addition, set modeling, arrays, single digit etc (below). It exists to build conceptual understanding of the multiplication facts that are at some point memorized by many students. When I work with students who are a more than a year behind in the…
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Life Skills Math – Not So Easy
As I wrote previously, shopping is dense with math tasks as are grocery stores. Here are some division situations that are sneaky challenging and require a student to know when and why to divide before even reaching for the calculator. I will use these to help illustrate the fact that life skills math is not…
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Intro to Graphing Inequalities
For years over many settings from middle school to college I have witnessed students struggle to make sense out of inequalities like x < 4. Not only is the concept of an inequality of an inequality challenging, merely reading the symbol is problematic. This post shows an concept based approach to making sense of inequalities.…
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Introduction to Inequalities
For students with special needs, the teacher speaking “math” to students sounds like the teacher from the Peanuts cartoons. This is apparently the case when students are learning about inequalities such as x < 4 because I have seen many high school and college students struggle with this topic. The challenge is that teachers are…
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K-12 Math Education is a Line of Dominoes
Critical dominoes in math education start falling in 6th and 7th grade with the last ones falling in college. If you have a student who struggles with math and is entering or returning to middle school, now is the time to intervene to avoid more serious issues related to math education in the future. If…
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Shopping is Dense with Math Tasks
I recently worked with a student on an online grocery shopping activity – finding ingredients for mac and cheese. We had the ingredients listed in a column on a Google Doc (allows both of us to edit the doc simultaneously) and then he cropped and pasted a photo of each ingredient (see photo below). The…
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Critical Thinking
Often we adults engage students with closed-ended questions and then consider this as having a conversation with the student. I witnessed this first hand in a high school consumer math course I co-taught. The adults sat with the students the first day after December break for a conversation about their break. The questions were consisted…