If you want to encourage your middle school students to” be the best they can be,” here are two competitions for you to consider.  Both are national and aimed at promoting high achievement through regular math meetings.  At least one person on staff will have to head the program, teach the high standard mathematics required […]

How could we organize a math fair? And what kinds of projects would our students present? I’m not thinking here of projects that would be judged, as in a science fair, but rather investigations and activities that would engage middle school students and be presented for the whole school as well as parents. One idea comes from […]

Everywhere our students are hearing about the HINI influenza. Their interest offers an opportunity to co-teach with a science teacher in an investigation of what we know and don’t know about this pandemic. The New York Times has created an interdisciplinary lesson Pandemic Panic: Researching the 2009 Influenza A (H1N1) Pandemic that asks students to […]

You may have heard this complaint or even made it yourself: “These tests are more about reading than they are about math!”  Students are increasingly asked to understand and apply math to situations, rather than just perform an operation on numbers. This involves reading the math text that sets out the problem scenario.
Add to that […]

As in other subjects, writing forces us to order our thoughts, make them clear to others. In mathematics, writing, as difficult as it is, helps students organize their understandings of concepts and set out for themselves their reasoning about a problem and its solution.  As stated in the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, “students […]

Reading the math textbook or handouts or extended response problems presents built-in challenges. The vocabulary of mathematics can be confusing, with some words meaning one thing in a mathematical context and another in everyday settings. Symbols can look alike, and different symbols can represent the same operation (for example, *, x, and • for multiplication). […]

Do you find that your middle school students still become confused with decimals? Not unusual! The resources here offer support in explaining the concepts underpinning addition and subtraction of decimals, in particular, place value. They also include demonstrations of addition and subtraction and opportunities for practice. The goal for students, as stated in NCTM’s Focal […]

Your textbook has many, many problems on finding the measurements of a circle, so I looked for problems that are off the beaten track. The result is an unusual set of applications to the circle, therefore challenging but intriguing, I think, for middle school classes. Let your colleagues know of your own ideas  and comments […]

These resources offer practice in operating on decimals and, moreover, opportunities to think about the processes of multiplication and division. As stated in the NCTM Focal Points, students should make sense of these procedures, become fluent in performing them, and be able to apply them in solving problems. I believe these sites, as a whole, offer […]

You probably already incorporate games in your teaching. We even highlighted math games in an earlier post - Let’s Talk Teaching: Math Games. Games are a great way to focus students’ attention as few other teaching strategies can. The ones selected here deal directly with the math content covered in the middle grades. Each has […]