Teaching and Learning maths with middle schoolers

"Math And Logic Problems to develop logical reasoning and creative thinking "

Here is a graphic preview for all of the Dynamic Number Line Worksheets. You can select different variables to customize these Number Line Worksheets for your needs. The Number Line Worksheets are randomly created and will never repeat so you have an endless supply of quality Number Line Worksheets to use in the classroom or at home. We also produce blank Number Line Worksheets for your use. Our Number Line Worksheets are free to download, easy to use, and very flexible. These Number Line Worksheets are a great resource for children in Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, and 5th Grade.

"Welcome to Inside Mathematics, a professional resource for educators passionate about improving students' mathematics learning and performance. This site features classroom examples of innovative teaching methods and insights into student learning, tools for mathematics instruction that teachers can use immediately, and video tours of the ideas and materials on the site. We are glad you're here and look forward to learning with you! News - Inside Mathematics is aligning its resources with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics."

"I picked this idea up, like so many things, from Dan Meyer. He claims that it's one of those games-like chess or mancala-that just has always existed. My students have become enamored with the game, which we've dubbed "Lone Wolfs." It's an unintentionally awesome play on words spoken by a student earlier this year ("We're just two lone wolfs") The time spent trying to understand whether that was poetry or paltry grammer was longer than you'd expect. Anyhoo… Here are the rules: Choose a positive integer You lose if you choose the same number as someone else Lowest number wins"

"Student takes a picture of work with his high-res camera phone and texts it to the other students in his group. Student then leaves the room. This kind of remediation is really common. I will often run little clinics during odd liminal times of the day. The students who get left off the Socratic train during class often just need a small piece of direct instruction that they can back-fill under the conceptualization. I didn't see the phone coming. I can only imagine how that student's brain may have engaged differently if he had to copy everything I was writing while listening to me while hoping to go to lunch quickly. "

"Have you been gamified yet? Perhaps not a painful as it sounds, gamification is on its way to becoming THE buzzword of 2011."

"Heather MacKinlay's work as an engineer has taken her from the civility of Surrey to the wild west of Australian mining towns and multibillion pound projects in the Algerian desert. And along the way she has also become a successful painter. Heather tells Plus that engineering and painting are just different ways of looking at the world, and how her work as a cost engineer is all about understanding the big picture."

"ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) - By combining sophisticated mathematical techniques more commonly used by spies instead of scientists with the power and versatility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a Penn neurologist has developed a new approach for studying the inner workings of the brain. A hidden pattern is encoded in the seemingly random order of things presented to a human subject, which the brain reveals when observed with fMRI. The research is published in the journal NeuroImage."

"Students often forget geometric language they learned in earlier grades The meaning - precise or vague - of words such as parallelogram, rhombus, angle bisector, acute angle, escape them. They have not learned to talk "geometry". But the language is only a small part of the issue. Much harder is that their teacher is almost certainly thinking about geometry in ways they cannot imagine: they cannot know what they do not know."

"In a digital world where we can easily "find an app for that" to help solve many problems, rarely do teachers have a one stop shopping place for all their classroom digital needs. There are many individual tools that can aid a teacher in retrieving student's digital work, polling/quizzing students or assigning work, but each of these tools usually requires a separate account. However, there is one, free, Web 2.0 app that brings everything together that you need for your classroom, including a social learning environment. The app that does all of this is called Edmodo. Here are just a few features that make Edmodo so great for teachers and students:"

"Ever need to find the LCM (same as the LCD) for a pair of two numbers, but you don't feel like spending two hours writing out the multiples for the numbers and waiting till you get a match. Of course you need to do this - a lot! Example: whenever you add fractions with different denominators you need to find the common denominator. That is the LCM. Here's a quick way to do this."

"Students need many concrete experiences with fractions to develop a deep understanding of the three models of fractions: area, linear and set models. Teachers need to address all three models in well-designed instructional activities so that students develop a rich concept of fractions that they can use to make sense of numbers, operations, measurement and probability. "

Here are some of the best places to ask your math questions, each at zero cost. Do you have a favorite that I've missed?

"Group work in mathematics is a tricky one. At times students can see it as a "sit-off" and chaos without any real learning can ensue. However, when it is successful, group work is an extremely powerful learning tool"

"We are in the middle of our polynomial unit and I decided now would be an appropriate time to teach exponent rules. I had prepared a concept attainment for the exponent rules before I talked to my coach. She suggested that we stray away from teaching 'rules' and rather teach the concept behind it. So basically, I only taught the concept of multiplying the coefficients and adding the exponents. When it came to the power to a power rule, we literally expanded it out and then multiplied coefficients and added the exponent. The more that we practiced the concept and writing them out, the more students figured out the shortcut of taking the coefficient to the power and then just multiplying the exponents. "

Division of Fractions e-book

Several teachers, in the US and Australia, have asked us for assistance in teaching division of fractions.

My colleague Catherine Pearn (University of Melbourne) and I have written a short account of division of  fractions, aimed at teachers. Version 1.0  is freely available here:   Division_of_Fractions_Davis_&_Pearn

"The weather is one of the biggest external influences on human society, as well as providing the English with an inexhaustible topic of conversation. However, it's also extremely complicated"

"What does it take to learn the Index Laws? Surprisingly little if you (i) can fold a piece of paper (ii) can multiply by two. I first observed my head teacher do a version of this lesson last year with his Year 7 class, and had the joy of doing a more advanced version with my Year 9 this year. I have a feeling the idea goes back to the dawn of maths teaching, but I haven't seen a resource explaining it, so thought it would be fun to share my take on it."