Blog

What’s a Venn Diagram? Way back in the 1880’s, John Venn popularized this graphic organizer to illustrate the relationships between two or more sets of items. In fact, Venn-style diagrams have been around since the...

Mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy once said, “The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.” His quote reminds me of one of my favorite math experiences that...

A respected colleague once reminded me of an old saying, “You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it.” She was a classroom teacher and exasperated by all the testing she had to do with her...

Launching a Math Lesson with Dr. Seuss Choosing a book by Dr. Seuss to launch a math lesson made me reflect on the author’s contributions to children’s literature. Although Theodor Seuss Geisel is immensely popular,...

Engaging Experiences for Transitional Kindergarten Recently, I sat in on a professional development session in which Math Transformations consultant Elba Ozakcay shared some of her favorite lessons with a group of transitional kindergarten teachers. Watching...

The other day I was reading an opinion piece about teaching subtraction, and although I didn’t agree with some of the ideas in the article, it really made me think, talk to colleagues and friends,...

Literature-Launched Lessons for Grades K-3 One is a Snail Ten is a Crab by April Pulley Sayre and Jeff Sayre is a children’s book all about feet, and it’s my current favorite. Did you know...

An Intriguing Game for Kids and Adults Earlier this year I was having dinner with my nephew Brandon, and his partner Patty. While we were eating, the topic of mathematics came up (Patty is a...

For students to gain foundations for place value, the Common Core Content Standards call for kindergartners to compose and decompose numbers from 11 to 19 into ten ones and some further ones, using objects or...