Message From Marian

Dear Friends,

I hope you had a lovely start to your school year. We are so pleased to continue our partnership with you.

I am positive you are going to LOVE our feature interview with Beth Kobett, an outstanding American math educator with thoughtful and practical ideas about formative assessment, from which we can all benefit and learn. Interviewing her was such a wonderful experience for me!

I also hope you’ll enjoy my short piece on number riddles. This feature article might resemble our Shareables in that you can use these ideas right away in your classroom. It was fun to think about what sorts of riddles make sense at different levels and come up with ways to help you create your own riddles for your students.

The opportunity to share Open Questions you might use in your classroom is always something I am happy to do. In this issue, the open questions focus on data and geometry. There are questions for students at each of the Kindergarten to Grade 2, Grades 3 to 5, and Grades 6 to 8 levels.

A couple of years ago, I interacted with a few teachers about an interesting strategy their students created for subtraction, and I have shared that in our Things We Love this month.

The What’s This? section in this issue provided me with a chance to present some ideas about number strings that you can use with your students. I explain what number strings are and why they are useful, and demonstrate a few kinds of strings you might try.

In this month’s Ask Marian video, I talk about teaching both customary (or imperial) and metric measurement systems to younger children. The text questions deal with the assessment of processes or practice standards and what kinds of exit tickets you might use on different days. I also discuss how to respond when students bring more traditional algorithms taught by parents into the classroom, as well as the question of acceleration.

Our How-To Video explores some of the significant advantages of using bar models (also called bar diagrams) to represent equations.

In Books We Love, we introduce Actual Size, by Steve Jenkins, a fascinating book that showcases the sizes of animals around the world in captivating and engaging ways.

As usual, there are Shareables for each of the three grade bands—Kindergarten to Grade 2, Grades 3 to 5, and Grades 6 to 8—in which we offer all-new ideas and activities for many strands.

The Let’s Dig In videos in this issue’s M Live! section focus on the “But What If” strategy, which can help you, as a teacher, create interesting alternative problems from the ones you might borrow from resources.

It’s always a pleasure to hear from you, so please don’t hesitate to stay in touch. We look forward to reading your submissions for Ask Marian and any feedback or comments.