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 […]

This article was written by Stephanie Chasteen and originally published in the May 2009 Integrating Technology column of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, an online magazine for elementary teachers. All versions of this article are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Stephanie is a science teaching fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She […]

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 […]

There are middle school projects that gain impact through collaboration with students outside your own classroom, such as estimating the average amount of water used per person per day. This problem takes on deeper relevance when averages are compared to those of classrooms around the country and the world. Other projects, such as finding the circumference […]

This blog post was written by middle school technology, math, and science teacher Tom Jenkins who is also a Teacher Leader for the Middle School Portal 2: Math & Science Pathways social network.
If you were to have walked into my classroom today, you would have seen preteens creating cartoons or even their own videogames. How […]

Many students never really understand volume or surface area, although they can memorize the formulas and even apply them on tests. These resources have been selected with an eye to helping students enter into the concepts of volume and surface area through practical problems, hands-on experiences, and applets they can manipulate to actually see how […]

This article was written by David Hayward and originally published in the April 2009 Integrating Technology column of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, an online magazine for elementary teachers. All versions of this article are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
A social bookmarking web site could change the way you do your job! Bookmarking services […]

You may have heard tales of hidden math treasure out there on the World Wide Web, but how to find it for your middle school classroom? Consider this blog post a treasure map, with X marking five sites that we’d like to recommend for productive digging. At each you will find activities, lessons, or projects that […]