Math Education Articles for Teachers

A love of learning begins with a seed planted early on. We teachers of young elementary students ought to plant that seed by making learning enjoyable from the get go. Especially for more artistic-minded learners, something like math commonly becomes a chore before children even leave the primary...

We each seek to connect what we teach our middle schoolers to real-life experiences. Why not connect mathematical concepts to local restaurants? Here are some ideas to get things started. Connect Percents to Practical Understanding Your local restaurant is the perfect place to connect percents ...

Do you remember playing Around the World or doing speed drills in math class when you were in school? Most teachers do. Yet, many games and drills that used to be effective for reinforcing math skills have been abandoned in today’s math classroom. Is this the best idea for our students? I would a...

Teachers know to expect a range of skills and abilities from incoming students each year, but there are certain fundamentals that children must finish each given year having mastered. For first grade teachers, your co-workers next door will thank you when you send them a classroom full of confide...

If you’re a fourth to ninth grade math teacher, you know how difficult it can be to make sure that all of your kids are challenged. There are a lot of options for helping your struggling students, but it's not always easy to find avenues for those who need the extra challenge. In the never-endin...

The new Common Core standards for math may seem daunting at first glance, but with a shift in perspective and a familiar teaching method, implementing the Common Core may not be that hard to achieve. If one looks at the basic objectives found in the Common Core curriculum, he will see that they p...

One of the most difficult tasks for math teachers is helping frustrated students overcome their negative feelings about learning math. The reasons for these feelings are varied, but the end result is all too often the same. They contribute to low achievement in mathematics.   The Math Myth ...

Implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative has huge implications for high school mathematics courses and the teachers who teach them. This is evidenced, in part, by the fact that the Common Core Standards for Mathematics document includes a lengthy 148-page appendix devoted to a...

What percent of our time do we spend sleeping in a typical day? Doing homework? Traveling in a car? Eating? Arguing with Mom? Have your learners compute the data, then display their results on graphs they create by hand, or on Excel-style graphs or charts. I prefer to have my students create thes...

Teaching opportunities present themselves every day, in nearly any context. Parents and teachers alike are capable of providing engaging, challenging, and enriching moments intended to extend and apply learning to real-life situations. Today we aren’t talking about learning in the classroom, we a...

Wondering how to turn the all-American pastime into a series of great math lessons or stations for fourth through seventh graders? A little bit of prep work is all that’s needed to keep your students engaged in math concepts. To get you started, follow these tips: Visit the MLB website for a l...

The study of mathematics requires an approach unlike the methods used in the study of most other subjects. Interestingly enough, many students progress to higher math levels, like algebra and geometry, without having developed the study skills necessary for success in these courses. Many also fai...

When you spend as many years in the classroom as I did, you see lots of innovative ideas come and go; some good and some not so good. I think this is especially true in the field of mathematics. When I first started teaching, the only writing required in high school math courses was the “let x = ...

There is a world of creativity that can be employed with something as simple as a cube and a rectangular prism. Have your class work intimately with the concepts of surface area and volume as they create Zarcon-proof homes, which are protected from deadly rays by aluminum foil. To construct these...

The algorithm for multiplying fractions is easy, especially if you’ve already covered adding and subtracting fractions, which presumably has exposed your kids to lots of practice with reducing and the idea of simplest form. However, the concept of what is actually happening when you multiply frac...