Sara Delano Moore – författare

Put math manipulatives to work in your classroom and make teaching and learning math both meaningful and productive. Would you like to bring math learning to life and make it more concrete, relevant, and accessible to your students? Do you wish you could do more with the manipulatives buried in your supply closet? Do you want to more effectively use virtual manipulatives in your distance learning? Whether physical or virtual, commercial or home-made, manipulatives are a powerful learning tool to help students discover and represent mathematical concepts. Mastering Math Manipulatives includes everything you need to integrate math manipulatives—both concrete and virtual—into math learning. Each chapter of this richly illustrated, easy-to-use guide focuses on a different powerful tool, such as two-color counters, linking cubes, base ten blocks, fraction manipulatives, pattern blocks, tangrams, geometric solids, and others, and includes a set of activities that demonstrate the many ways teachers can leverage manipulatives to model and reinforce math concepts for all learners. It features:

Classroom strategies for introducing math manipulatives, including commercial, virtual, and hand-made manipulatives, into formal math instruction. Step-by-step instructions for 75 activities that work with any curriculum, including four-color photos, printable work mats, and demonstration videos. Handy charts that sort activities by manipulative type, math topic, domains aligned with standards, and grade-level appropriateness.

It's time to dive in and join in the journey toward making manipulatives meaningful so math learning is concrete, profound, and effective for your students! 

Selected as the Michigan Council of Teachers of Mathematics winter book club book! Rich tasks, collaborative work, number talks, problem-based learning, direct instruction…with so many possible approaches, how do we know which ones work the best? In Visible Learning for Mathematics, six acclaimed educators assert it’s not about which one—it’s about when—and show you how to design high-impact instruction so all students demonstrate more than a year’s worth of mathematics learning for a year spent in school. That’s a high bar, but with the amazing K-12 framework here, you choose the right approach at the right time, depending upon where learners are within three phases of learning: surface, deep, and transfer. This results in “visible” learning because the  effect is tangible. The framework is forged out of current research in mathematics combined with John Hattie’s synthesis of more than 15 years of education research involving 300 million students.  Chapter by chapter, and equipped with video clips, planning tools, rubrics, and templates, you get the inside track on which instructional strategies to use at each phase of the learning cycle:  Surface learning phase: When—through carefully constructed experiences—students explore new concepts and make connections to procedural skills and vocabulary that give shape to developing conceptual understandings. Deep learning phase: When—through the solving of rich high-cognitive tasks and rigorous discussion—students make connections among conceptual ideas, form mathematical generalizations, and apply and practice procedural skills with fluency. Transfer phase: When students can independently think through more complex mathematics, and can plan, investigate, and elaborate as they apply what they know to new mathematical situations.  To equip students for higher-level mathematics learning, we have to be clear about where students are, where they need to go, and what it looks like when they get there. Visible Learning for Math brings about powerful, precision teaching for K-12 through intentionally designed guided, collaborative, and independent learning.

Select the right task, at the right time, for the right phase of learning

It could happen in the morning during homework review. Or perhaps it happens when listening to students as they struggle through a challenging problem. Or maybe even after class, when planning a lesson. At some point, the question arises: How do I influence students' learning—what’s going to generate that light bulb “aha” moment of understanding?

In this sequel to the megawatt best seller Visible Learning for Mathematics, John Almarode, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, John Hattie, and Kateri Thunder help you answer that question by showing how Visible Learning strategies look in action in the mathematics classroom. Walk in the shoes of middle school teachers as they engage in the 200 micro-decisions-per-minute needed to balance the strategies, tasks, and assessments seminal to high-impact mathematics instruction. Using grade-leveled examples and a decision-making matrix, you’ll learn to

Articulate clear learning intentions and success criteria at surface, deep, and transfer levels Employ evidence to guide students along the path of becoming metacognitive and self-directed mathematics achievers Use formative assessments to track what students understand, what they don’t, and why Select the right task for the conceptual, procedural, or application emphasis you want, ensuring the task is for the right phase of learning Adjust the difficulty and complexity of any task to meet the needs of all learners

It’s not only what works, but when. Exemplary lessons, video clips, and online resources help you leverage the most effective teaching practices at the most effective time to meet the surface, deep, and transfer learning needs of every student.