The 2024 Virtual Math Summit is this month!  Here’s a preview of 3 sessions from Michaela Epstein, Rosalba Serrano, and Nicole Thompson & Jessica Batinovic giving you tips, ideas, and inspiration to make our Number Routines the best they can be for your students.  To see the full list of speakers, their presentations, and to get registered go to VirtualMathSummit.com/register. To get any links mentioned in this episode, go to the show notes page at BuildMathMinds.com/156.

The 2024 Virtual Math Summit starts in less than 1 month!   Check out this preview of Dr. Jim Ewing’s keynote session about Teaching Math with Newcomers in Mind.  To see the full list of speakers, their presentations, and to get registered go to VirtualMathSummit.com/register. To get any links mentioned in this episode, go to the show notes page at BuildMathMinds.com/155.

The 2024 Virtual Math Summit is coming soon.  This week’s episode gives you a preview of 4 sessions that focus on helping students build their understanding and fluency of multiplication.    Check out this preview of Shannon Olson, Juli Dixon, Thuc-Khahn Park, and Brittany Hege’s sessions.  To see the full list of speakers, their presentations, and to get registered go to VirtualMathSummit.com/register. To get any links mentioned in this episode, go to the show notes page at...

The 2024 Virtual Math Summit is just around the corner.  This week’s episode gives you a preview of 4 of the sessions. To see the full list of speakers, their presentations, and to get registered go to VirtualMathSummit.com/register.  I’m a huge supporter of Student-Centered Classrooms and so for this episode I grabbed some clips to share with you that give you ideas for ways to create that in your math class.  Tammy McMorrow, Latrenda Knighten, Ed Nolan, and Mona Iehl each have presentations...

I get asked why I don’t do much training about Time & Measurement.  I do have some videos, you can see them in my Playlists at the YouTube channel, but there is a real reason why I don’t talk about those concepts as much as others.  So in this video you get my thoughts (based upon what other math educators & researchers have to say) about why we shouldn’t spend a bunch of time teaching time & measurement in math class.

This essential understanding about division is something even adults struggle with: Division is defined by its inverse relationship with multiplication.  Our textbooks want us to teach division as its own separate operation but a key to helping students understand and become proficient in division is to teach it in conjunction with multiplication.  In this episode I’m sharing an excerpt from one book in the Putting Essential Understandings into Practice series.  To get any links mentioned in...

Want a quick & easy to implement activity that will show you how much your students know about the math operations and about math story problems?  I’ve got it for you in this week’s Build Math Minds podcast.  This idea comes from the book Taking Action: Implementing Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices by DeAnn Huinker and Victoria Bill.  You can find a link to it and any other resources mentioned at the show notes page buildmathminds.com/150

The two ends of the spectrum when teaching math seem to be “here are the exact ways to solve this problem, follow it exactly,” and “you figure it out, I’m not telling you anything.”  Neither of these tend to work.  Instead it’s about finding a balance between these. We need to give some guidance, but not too much.  We want them to figure out ways to solve problems on their own but we can’t let them flounder. The book 7 Steps to a Language-Rich, Interactive Classroom by John Seidlitz &...

It's been an incredible journey over the past two weeks as we've explored nine key strategies to Kickstart your students' number sense. Now, as we reach the end of this Kickstart event, it's essential to understand that the foundations you're laying are seeds of number sense, and their growth will be gradual. These principles we've discussed serve as the blueprint for you to navigate through the upcoming school year: Do Number Routines and Contextual Problems with a focus on understanding. ...

The saying "Practice Makes Perfect" often implies that repetition leads to mastery. However, practicing something you do poorly, or incorrectly, doesn't make it perfect; it instead reinforces bad habits. Practice actually makes PERMANENT. Practice is crucial, but it should follow the establishment of a strong sense of numbers. Day 9’s tip is to find a new way for students to practice math. Today's audio message discusses two valuable approaches to make practice more enjoyable and connected...

Day 8 of the Number Sense Kickstart emphasizes a simple, yet sometimes difficult, teaching strategy: Let students solve story problems, don’t give them the steps. The concept of Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) plays a pivotal role here. It acknowledges that students bring their innate mathematical knowledge shaped by everyday experiences with numbers to the table when solving problems. Students often solve problems in different ways than we think they should mathematically…however their...

In Day 7 of our Number Sense Kickstart we are shifting from the theoretical ideas I’ve shared so far into practical classroom strategies that make it easier to do the theoretical ideas.  Our first practical idea is to do a Number Routine with your students.  These structured, brief activities, taking just 5-10 minutes, are a potent tool for meaningful math engagement. Number Routines help students develop the 8 number sense concepts, encouraging them to interact with numbers and share their...

Today we're diving into the Concrete-Representational-Abstract (C-R-A) model of teaching mathematics. Typically, these stages are presented in isolation, with separate lessons for each. However, the real impact comes when all three are combined in a single lesson. This integration helps students see connections between different problem-solving methods and leads to those "A-HA" moments. The action item for Day 6 of the Number Sense Kickstart is to seek opportunities to combine C-R-A in your...

It’s Day 5 of the Number Sense Kickstart and we're focusing on the power of visuals in elementary math education. Just like in reading, where creating mental images enhances comprehension, visuals are essential in math to deepen students' understanding of numbers and mathematical operations.  However, sometimes the visuals that are in math textbooks and worksheets you download off the internet don’t actually help students understand the math. In today’s training we look at ensuring that...

This is Day 4 of the Number Sense Kickstart and we are exploring the profound impact of active listening in the classroom. Did you know that in the typical classroom, teachers do 89% of the talking, while students ask only 11 questions a day, primarily procedural ones? It's time to change this narrative and shift the balance toward student engagement. We draw inspiration from educator Steven C. Reinhart’s article “Never Say Anything a Kid Can Say For You.”  We explore his five techniques...

Most textbooks are focused on answer-getting so their assessments are also focused on just answer-getting.  That doesn’t tell you anything about what your students understand, only what they can do. To ensure you are building your students’ understanding of numbers, you need some way to keep track of what they are understanding.  It’s Day 3 of the Number Sense Kickstart and today is all about recording what your students understand about the 8 number sense concepts.  If you have taken The...

Mathematics is so much more than just getting the answers.  Answers are important, but that really doesn’t tell you what your students UNDERSTAND about math, it only tells you what they can DO.   If you want to see what your students understand there are 8 number sense concepts that are the root of understanding numbers.  It’s Day 2 of our Number Sense Kickstart and in today’s episode Christina Tondevold is detailing each of those 8 number sense concepts.  This is the longest video of our...

Do you have students struggling with their number sense and fluency in elementary mathematics?  You aren’t the only one!  Over the last few years we’ve seen gaps in students’ understanding get bigger and bigger.  So many elementary students are not fluent with math and the underlying issue is their lack of number sense.  Textbooks often jump straight into having kids operate with numbers but they have no number sense to be able to understand why the procedures even work.  That’s why we’ve...

Here in the United States, it is the end of the school year and teachers are contemplating what work they should send home with students for them to do over the summer.  In today's podcast, I get into why I'm not a big fan of general problem packets over the summer and how the phrase "practice makes perfect" is a little inaccurate.

I've been on a kick about math fluency lately and how a lot of textbooks have their teaching of fluency wrong. Growing up, fluency to me meant being good at the algorithm.  Being able to follow the steps that the teacher laid out for students was the sign of being fluent. But, as textbooks have started teaching new strategies, students and parents are left feeling confused. In today’s episode I wanted to share this chart I found in an article by Randall Charles because it highlights the...

In the last episode of the podcast, I shared the three ideas that make up computational fluency. Flexibility is often the piece that is missing in our fluency instruction, but recently textbooks have tried to incorporate more of it, but in the wrong way. In this week’s podcast, I go over some of the shortcomings in the ways textbook’s teach fluency and what we should really be focusing on when we’re teaching fluency.

 The Flexibility Formula courses that I offer have a huge focus on how we can help kids develop number sense, but the main reason to focus on number sense is really to help your students become flexible thinkers; to build their flexibility in mathematics. In episode 144, I talk about how my courses started and the research that inspired them. Come take a listen as I discuss the concepts that make up computational fluency.

Each of you listening to this podcast have different goals for your professional development.  You have different things you are wanting to read about to help your students next year have an even better math experience in your classroom. So I’ve compiled a bunch of different lists on Amazon so you can choose from books for specific areas you want to focus on. Come check out Episode #143 where I share my summer reading lists for elementary math teachers for 2022.

Have you ever felt like the thing you’re going through will never end? There is no doubt that hard times can wear us out and make us feel helpless. Then, it can seem like the good times don't last long enough. Whether it's good or bad times, it's important to remember that nothing lasts forever. In this week’s episode, we are talking about how to think about going through the hard times, and the good times by remembering that Nothing Lasts Forever.