Math Teaching Tips & Ideas to Build Understanding

Looking for math manipulatives DIY ideas? Download this free math manipulatives tool kit to create engaging, hands-on activities for middle and high school math! These printable PDFs make it easy to DIY lessons on topics like volume, angles, fractions, factors, surface area, polynomials, triangles, and more. The tool kit also includes a helpful guide to plan activities and lessons for interactive learning. Perfect for hands-on math success!

Try this when you teach fraction division. No need for keep change flip or any othe math tricks. This task will get 5th grade students thinking about how to divide fractions! Watch the full video.

Reversibility is doing and undoing in math. It’s being able to work backward. Asking students to start from the end is a great way to create rigorous questions and tasks in math lessons. Here’s are a few middle school and high school math examples. Find more information on my blog at riseoverrunteacher.com

One of the hardest shifts as a math teacher is stepping back and giving students space to think. We want to help. We want to explain, but often, our talking takes away the chance for them to wrestle with the math. Here are five practical ways to reduce teacher talk and increase student learning time

The "Keep-Change-Flip" (KCF) method is a common math trick used to teach students how to divide fractions. This method works and provides the correct answer, but there is a significant downside. If our only focus is on getting the answer, KCF can seem very appealing. However, students often end up with no clue how they arrived at that answer or if it even makes sense. Additionally, tricks without meaning are frequently applied incorrectly in later problems, leading to confusion and...

Asking good questions to students in math is key to getting them to think! Here are 4 types of questions to ask and examples. This free guide will help you plan and ask productive questions to your students.

In math class, we should be asking our students these 4 types of questions: focus, insight, push the thinking, and metacognitive. Grab this free guide to help you plan and ask better questions! It includes tips and question stems to get you started.

I’ve picked out a few of my favorite books for math educators. Add these to your summer reading list: Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler, Making Number Talks Matter, and Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl. See why I love these books!

Shortcuts are a necessary part of math. If you are an efficient problem solver, you are likely using shortcuts that you have learned. The approach to shortcuts is what we must examine. Are we showing students all the shortcuts without allowing time for them to understand why they work? If we are

The butterfly method is a trick for multiplying numerators times denominators in order to compare to fractions. The issue is that it does not require students to think or use number sense. For many fraction comparison problems, students should be able to think and visualize the fractions to decide which one is greater. This is a math shortcut that is often causes confusion later!

Someone asked me if shortcuts were good or bad, so here are my thoughts. Shortcuts are part of math. When you use a formula, you’re using a shortcut. When you follow a rule you know, it’s a shortcut. Getting better at math includes becoming more efficient… which involves using shortcuts. However… If students just learn shortcuts to answers without understanding them, they aren’t really learning math. They’re learning tricks… which may seem helpful on a quiz… but usually cause problems...

Save this idea for teaching statistics topics. Wisdom of crowds says that if you take a lot of estimations, the median will be close to the actual value. Try it out in your math classroom!