TUSD Math Resources

Mathematics educator Dan Meyer blogs about teaching math on dy/dan. Meyer shares teaching ideas along with reflections about mathematics curriculum and pedagogy. Those new to the site may want to start with the Archives, where visitors may search through past posts via a variety of subject tags, including Classroom Management, Assessment, and Great Classroom Action (which features a number of creative and engaging classroom activities). A highlight of this blog is Three-Act Tasks, a series of lesson plans centered on student problem solving. These engaging lessons are accompanied by videos that are sure to pique student interest.

Each day of the school year I present my students with an estimation challenge. I love helping students improve both their number sense and problem solving skills. I'd like to share the estimation challenges with you and your students. Michael Fenton and I have collaborated on this handout for your students. Happy Estimating!

Mathematics teachers and tutors, especially those who work with students with special needs, may be interested in the Learning Kaleidoscope. Authored by Andrew Gael, who teaches mathematics at a K-12 school designed for students with disabilities, this blog is designed to share instructional techniques and build community among math teachers. Check out the Tasks & Instructional Routines tab, which features hands-on-activities designed to engage students in math concepts. One highlight of this collection is a shopping activity related to financial literacy. Under the #SwDMathChat (Students with Disabilities Math Chat) tab, instructors can check out archived chats that took place between mathematics teachers on Twitter. Each conversation centers on a different topic related to teaching math to students with disabilities, including collaboration with general education teachers and neurodiversity.

Math at the Core: Middle School is a collection of hundreds of free resources for math students in fifth through eighth grades. Most of these resources are short videos that explain a variety of mathematical concepts. The collection also includes infographics, interactive features, links to outside resources, and more. Math educators and tutors can browse the collection by grade level or by Common Core domains. Common Core domains include operations and algebraic thinking, the number system, geometry, statistics & probability, and more.

James Stanton, a mathematician, describes his site like this: On this site I present a whole host of curriculum essays, more general mathematical essays, and puzzlers. I offer books that cover the content of the high school curriculum in a joyful and accessible way (with no sacrifice to rigor) respectful of the beauty and wondrous creative nature of mathematics. I show how even high-school mathematics can surprise and delight, and how clean and uncluttered key topics can be.

For high school mathematics teachers, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics offers this collection of activities to help young mathematicians develop their quantitative reasoning skills. These activities have been developed by high school and college mathematics educators and can be downloaded in PDF format from this online library. Each PDF features a detailed teacher's guide as well as a student hand out. In one activity, "Cash or Gas?" students consider whether it is better to receive $250,000 in cash in an imagined lottery or free gas for life. Another activity, "As the Crow Flies," is designed to help students understand the logic and reasoning behind the Pythagorean theorem. These activities can be implemented alongside existing mathematics curriculum as they align with Common Core Standards.

The New Jersey Center for Teaching & Learning is a nonprofit organization dedicated to K-12 STEM education. On the organization's course materials page, educators will find a number of free resources for teaching math and science. These resources, which were designed by a team of STEM educators, include presentations, homework assignments, lab activities, and assessments. This collection includes math and science resources in both English and Spanish, along with a few English-language resources in English language arts and computer science. Materials are organized by subject and grade level for easy browsing. Grade levels range from kindergarten to advanced high school, including resources for advanced placement calculus, physics, biology, and chemistry.

Greg Coleman, Mr Elementary Math, has worked as a mathematics teacher and coach for fourteen years. Here, math tutors and teachers will find a variety of tips and ideas for supporting elementary-level math learners. Visitors can browse previous blog posts by category: number sense, addition & subtraction, multiplication & division, fractions & decimals, measurement & geometry, and math ideas. A recent post provides advice on how math teachers can save a classroom lesson when their technology fails them at the last minute. While aimed specifically at elementary school math teachers, many of Coleman's ideas may also be of interest to adult educators, tutors, parents, and caretakers.

Teach your students about the importance of math and statistics with resources that engage students by using real life data. Click below on the specific grade levels to discover activities on a variety of topics.

Reading bedtime stories to children is a common strategy to boost kids' literacy--but what about doing the same for math? Parents hoping to prevent math anxiety in their children may find Bedtime Math to be a formidable ally. This resource offers more than two thousand short math puzzles designed as fun activities for parents to do with their kids at bedtime. New puzzles are added daily and each features "a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in." Parents can subscribe for free to get new daily Bedtime Math puzzles via email or they can download a free app (available for iOS and Android devices) where they can access the puzzles in both English and Spanish. Bedtime Math also offers the "Crazy 8s Math Club!" a kit of free resources designed to be used for fun after-school recreational math clubs. Bedtime Math was created by Laura Overdeck, a mom with degrees in astrophysics and public policy who loved playing with numbers as a child. Bedtime Math's activities have been used in studies by the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, who both found their offerings to be beneficial.

The US Census Bureau provides access to a staggering amount of data that can be used to create "detailed portraits of the changing characteristics of [American] communities," but for the uninitiated, interpreting that data can be a challenge. To help address this difficulty, the Census Bureaus Statistics in Schools (SIS) program has created this collection of classroom geography activities designed to supplement the standard curriculum while providing useful learning tools related to real life data. Here, readers will find detailed, well-developed activity plans for students in grades 4-12, broadly grouped into grade level appropriate topics: elementary (e.g. "Examining Changes to the Environment Through Pictures and Data"), middle school (e.g. "What role does Geography Play in the Census?"), and high school (e.g. "Analyzing Correlations of Education and Income"). Individual activities indicate the specific grade level(s) they are intended for, and each gives a description, states the time and materials required, and also provides a list of learning objectives and a Bloom's Taxonomy teacher's note. Each lesson includes downloadable PDFs of teacher and student versions of the activity.

A curriculum aimed at middle- and high-school math students to help engage them in the world of Sports Analytics. Many students love sports, and engaging them in mathematics in this way is just too good an opportunity to pass up.

How do you evaluate a graph that you see in an advertisement or online? Why do airlines overbook their flights - and how do they decide how many tickets to sell per flight? Is there any strategy to the game of rock, paper, scissors? TED-Ed offers this engaging series of short videos about real-life applications of mathematics. As of this write-up, the series includes almost 90 videos. Some of these videos explore the unexpected ways that math is essential in art and everyday life (for example, in Pixar animations or Van Gogh's Starry Night). Other videos feature riddles for students to solve, followed by explanations of real-world application. And, one video explains the math behind online dating websites. Each video is accompanied by a multiple choice quiz (Think), additional information (Dig Deeper), and an open-ended discussion question (Discuss) to facilitate further student engagement.

For math students and teachers, this series of short videos (10-15 minutes apiece) by mathematician Kelsey Houston-Edwards provides engaging explanations of upper-level mathematics concepts. One example: Houston-Edwards explains graph coloring and how the math concept relates to the popular puzzle, Sudoku. In another video, viewers learn about Pick's theorem and how it can be used to calculate the area of complex polygons. These videos are likely to appeal to viewers with a range of mathematical backgrounds: Houston-Edwards dedicates each video to complex, advanced mathematical concepts, but is also quite skilled at breaking down these concepts with accessible diagrams and simple vocabulary.

Seeing Theory is a beautiful interactive website that aims to make statistics accessible to a wide range of students. The method? Interactive visualizations. The project brings to life fundamental concepts (Basic Probability, Compound Probability, Distributions, Statistical Inference, and Regression) covered in most introductory college or Advanced Placement (AP) statistics classes. Visualizations are broken down by categories and are accompanied by additional information about the method and data that they demonstrate.

Find engaging media and integrated activities, all aligned with the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. Designed for middle school students of diverse learning styles and backgrounds. Produced by a collaborative of public media stations and producers with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

At this site, the California Department of Education (CDE), California Mathematics Council (CMC), California Mathematics Project (CMP), and CCSESA's Mathematics Subcommittee of the Curriculum and Instruction Steering Committee (CISC) join together to provide needed information to California's teachers on California's Version of the Common Core Content Standards Mathematics (CaCCSS-M).

Inside Mathematics provides a resource for educators to provide the best mathematics instruction they can for their students. Our classroom doors have remained closed too often and for too long. This work grew out of the Noyce Foundation's Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative. SVMI is based on high performance expectations, ongoing professional development, examining student work, and improved math instruction. The initiative includes a formative and summative performance assessment system, pedagogical content coaching, and leadership training and networks.

The Mathematics Assessment Project is part of the Math Design Collaborative initiated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project set out to design and develop well-engineered tools for formative and summative assessment that expose students' mathematical knowledge and reasoning, helping teachers guide them towards improvement and monitor progress. The tools are relevant to any curriculum that seeks to deepen students' understanding of mathematical concepts and develop their ability to apply that knowledge to non-routine problems.

The goal of these materials is to illustrate how Common Core aligned math tasks can be used to support math instruction and language development for ELLs at three grade spans (elementary, middle, and high school). We used or adapted tasks from two publicly accessible curriculum projects, Inside Mathematics and Mathematics Assessment Project.