Math ideas and resources - Tales from Outside the Classroom

Working with Division

Some people, districts, textbooks (take your pick) teach multiplication and division together in one unit and at one time. I prefer to teach division a few weeks after multiplication; after students have had some time working with multiplication, exploring equal groups, and building a deep understanding of what multiplication means. You can also read more about how I introduce multiplication. For division, however, my go to is always, always food! Lesson engagement is at an

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9 Activities for Building Place Value and Number sense in the middle grades with base ten blocks

Building Place Value and Number Sense Skills

When I was an interventionist looking at our schoolwide data, I noticed something in our students’ math data. The students in third grade that scored lowest in math overall on our benchmark testing (NWEA’s MAP test), were the lowest scoring in the place value and number sense sub-domain. As time has gone on, I’ve continued to see that trend- that the lowest achieving students in math, tend to have poor number sense. Here are some

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Introducing the Distributive Property

The first time I taught the distributive property to my third graders I had no idea what I was doing. There was one (and I think only one) lesson in our textbook and it had students relate the distributive property to basketball where students figured out how many points were scored based on the number of two-pointers and three-pointers. In theory, it’s a great idea, and I’m sure I could have livened up that lesson

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Measuring Angles

Head on over to the Ellison blog to see how my students measured angles in our math textbook with a different sort of math tool! Just click the image below to head over.

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6 YouTube Channels to Help you Teach Math

I like to use videos and songs in my lessons as much as possible, and math videos are no different. Having a video give a minilesson gives students the opportunity to take a break from me and my voice, which they love. It also gives me a moment to sit down. Sitting down and being quiet for a moment is a glorious feeling that doesn’t happen too often in the classroom. Watching a video also

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