An iPad® can be used to teach students to graph parabolas with ease and grasp vocabulary quickly. Parabolas come to life for students in this easily implemented activity described in this article. Teachers can use this tool in a fun and interactive way to not only address these graphing and vocabulary concepts but also introduce and explore…

Parents in the United States expect their students to have homework; and students, especially in middle school and high school, expect daily homework assignments from their teachers. However, it is difficult to create effective homework assignments. Despite the challenges involved, the authors believe that homework "can" be an important…

One of the many challenges that teachers face in mathematics classrooms is determining how much of the verbal and written explanations help students accomplish instructional goals. The challenge is greater in linguistically diverse classrooms because the explanations and multiple representations are not perceived uniformly by all students. Recent…

Middle school students' mathematical understanding benefits from connecting mathematics to other content areas in the curriculum. This month's activity explores the issue of the scarcity of freshwater, a natural resource (activity sheets are included). This activity concentrates on the critical areas mentioned in the Common Core State…

While some students are enjoying days at the park or at the beach, forty middle school students are in a classroom solving challenging mathematics problems. The second Math Camp for middle school students was offered in 2013 at a western university for students from local school districts. For three days, these students met from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.…

A story problem about borrowing money, presented in this article, may be represented with positive or negative numbers and thought about in different ways. The authors describe ideas related to integers (both positive and negative) and how students used them in relation to a story problem, and how they related these ideas to equations.

Efforts to integrate mathematics and science have been widely recognized by mathematics and science educators. However, successful integration of these two important school disciplines remains a challenge. In this article, a mathematics and science activity extends the use of Venn diagrams to a life science context and then circles back to a…

The language that students are learning in mathematics classrooms is intimately tied to the mathematics they are learning. The goal for any lesson or unit is for all students to be able to understand the mathematics they read or hear and be able to speak and write about that mathematics. Structured vocabulary placement can support that dual…

Three mid-level mathematics teachers (grades 7 and 8) and a university mathematics educator formed a year-long professional learning community. The objective was to collectively look at how they were promoting the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) (CCSSI 2010) in their classes. The monthly discussions followed an iterative cycle in which…

Stephanie Whitney teaches in the department of teacher education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Her interest is in how students reason and make sense of mathematics, and how teachers can promote this behavior. Students should engage in reasoning and sense making daily in their mathematics classes. It is often through students'…

Student errors are springboards for analyzing, reasoning, and justifying. The mathematics education community recognizes the value of student errors, noting that "mistakes are seen not as dead ends but rather as potential avenues for learning." To induce specific errors and help students learn, choose tasks that might produce mistakes.…

In this article, one teacher describes her action research with eighth-grade prealgebra students who are working on a conceptual understanding of fractions. Examining her middle school students' standardized test scores for the previous five years, Denise S. Peppers discovered that student performance on fractions was consistently the lowest…

Writing in mathematics is complex. The purpose of this article is to share how one teacher, Ms. Hill, used peer-review activities involving rubrics to explicitly communicate mathematical resources that students could draw from when justifying a claim. She found that helping students understand which type of statements could be used in…

This article describes an exciting exploration-based activity in which students develop an alternative definition of factor that can help them solve problems like the one presented above. Students work in groups to collect data, analyze the data to make conjectures, and then spend a significant amount of time debating and justifying their…

One of the most common household polyhedra is a cereal box. For over 100 years, American companies like Kellogg's™ have packaged cereal in containers shaped like rectangular prisms. Why is a rectangular prism the most commonly used solid for holding cereal? Would another design work equally or more efficient? This article describes an…