I spent this week with a group of about 60 teachers at a California Math Science Partnership grant in Kings County. This is our third summer together. In the past I’ve always shared resources through Dropbox and/or Bitly. This year I’ve decided to share links, handouts, and a bit of commentary with a blog post instead.

On to the resources!

Slides, Slides, and More Slides!

The slides for the entire week are here.

Problem Solving

We started each day with 30 minutes of “problem solving” (really just my excuse to share some fun things I’ve discovered or created over the past few months).

Monday: Visual Patterns

Created by @fawnpnguyen

My landscape version of the student handout is here.
My old (two-column, portrait) version of the handout is here.
Here are the slides I use to introduce Visual Patterns to my students (over the course of multiple days) in PDF, Keynote, and PowerPoint.

Tuesday: The Running Game

This is a work in progress, but I’m happy with how things are moving along. I’ll probably write a blog post in the next few weeks describing the project. At that point I’ll add a page to the blog with a catalog of all the challenges.

For now you can find the first two challenges here. Look around in the images folder for the solutions.

Wednesday: Estimation 180

Created by @mr_stadel

Scroll down to find the handout. The latest version (including the space for reasoning) should be on Estimation180.com soon. If it’s not, you can get it here.

Update: The latest version of the handout (including space for reasoning) is posted here on Estimation180.com. A post by Andrew Stadel describing how to use the handout is here.

Thursday: Numblurs

Back in May Niko Rowinsky tweaked this game to create an excellent, logic-rich challenge for students. I love it. My students love it, too. How to play is in the full slide deck (and here for those who don’t like hunting for needles in slidestacks).

Friday: Daily Desmos

Created by @dandersod, @j_lanier, and @mjfenton

If you enjoy solving the challenges, consider submitting your own. Details on how to contribute are here. In most cases, creating your own challenge is easier than solving someone else’s!

Tasks and Practice Standards

We spent the mornings looking at various tasks from mathpractices.edc.org and discussing how they aligned to the CCSSM Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Here are the goods (hopefully with appropriate credit given where due):

Grade 3-6 Tasks
Grade 6-8 Tasks
Practice Standards with Commentary (from thinkmath.edc.org)

Planning

Teachers had 90 minutes each day after lunch to design units and lessons. I wanted to share some awesome ideas I’ve picked up from the #MTBoS recently, so Monday and Tuesday I gave brief presentations to kick off the planning time.

On Monday I nearly ran out of breath trying to share all of the awesomeness contained in Fawn Nguyen’s blog posts on Deconstructing a Lesson Activity (Part 1 and Part 2). If you haven’t read the full posts… Go. Read. Unless you just don’t care. (In which case, shame on you!)

On Tuesday we looked at Dan Meyer’s Makeover Monday series. Too much awesome to describe. I will say that several of the teachers have really taken the makeover model and run with it. Fun to watch!

Five Practices

I gave a brief presentation each afternoon on the key ideas from Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions. My talking points and the discussion questions are in the full slide deck.

For those who didn’t win one of the free copies of the book, I highly recommend you pick it up to add some meat to our daily discussions. Drop a line in the comments if you try these ideas out in your classroom. I’d love to hear how things are going.

Assessment

I’ll just drop some links here and hold off on the commentary.

SBAC Pilot Test (on the Smarter Balanced website)
SBAC Grade 4 Performance Task and Rubric
SBAC Grade 6 Performance Task and Rubric

Blogs

If you don’t read math blogs, you should. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few ideas.

If you teach elementary math…

• Let’s Play Math (Denise Gaskins)
• Moebius Noodles

If you teach middle school math…

• Finding Ways to Nguyen Students Over (Fawn Nguyen)
• Divisible by 3 (Andrew Stadel)

If you teach any kind of math…

• dy/dan (Dan Meyer)
• Overthinking My Teaching (Christopher Danielson)

This is just the tip of the math blogging iceberg, but it’s a great place to start. Enjoy!