A few years ago, we wanted to start a robotics club in our school. When I say we, I mean the school’s students, parents, and administration. While all the teachers thought it was a good idea, there was one big question—who was going to step up to the plate to lead the effort? None of the faculty had ever built a robot, never mind teaching a student to do so! As a result, I volunteered to start the robotics club with the understanding that I would have to learn along with the students.

If you have been teaching math for several years, as I have, you probably have seen a slump in your own and others’ practice. I survived the first few years of teaching, learning about classroom management and how to process the ever-continuing flow of correcting and administrative duties. Then I began thinking about what it was going to be like to do this for the rest of my life. Don’t get me wrong—I love teaching, but the daily grind sometimes ate away at my motivation.

In this era of increased demands on student reasoning in mathematics, I have been thinking about how to incorporate more student reasoning into my classroom. I came up with the P³: Partner Problem-Solving Protocol and Graphic Organizer.

Using number lines is one of those topics that are often taken for granted in the elementary and middle school curriculum. With the advent of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, their use is spelled out explicitly, beginning in Grade 2.

I have been seeing the usefulness of teaching fact families at the middle school level. As a result, I have been thinking about how students look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning (Mathematical Practice 8)  in a new way.

A topic that I have been thinking about recently is the use of area models to teach multiplication. Today’s post looks at how we can look for and make use of structure (Standard for Mathematical Practice 7). We will combine the topics of place value and area models in the elementary curriculum in order to help students see the structure of multi-digit multiplication. Today’s download will help your students see how the structure of the number system place value can be used to multiply two numbers. This method is a step in the process of the conceptual development of multiplication in Grade 4 that will help students eventually learn the standard algorithm for multiplying two two-digit numbers by the end of Grade 5.