Seeing the Math You Teach, Grades K-6

An Elementary Teacher’s Quick-Guide to Meaningful Mathematical Strategies and Representations

Because when you see the math, they can see it too.

The role of today’s classroom teacher has evolved from being a disseminator of information to a facilitator of learning. As an elementary teacher, you can guide student thinking to deeper levels of understanding by making connections between and among physical, visual, symbolic, verbal and contextual representations.

Seeing the Math You Teach, Grades K-6 is intended to help you help your students. It is an accessible guide for elementary teachers that focuses on making mathematics meaningful through multiple strategies and representations to help foster a love for mathematics in their students. The authors have written this book based on the deep belief that everyone can be good at math. It illustrates the most commonly seen and used visual models of each of the elementary mathematical content areas the way children think about them. Rather than a book full of prescribed problem solving strategies, this book will help you and your students literally “see” the structure of mathematical concepts–how and why they work–and make connections among various representations and topics.

This is not the kind of book to be read cover-to-cover. It is organized in a flexible format to inform the math teaching and learning going on in a classroom at a given moment. Enhancing teachers’ own clarity and understanding in mathematics, or in other words, “to see the math they teach,” this book:

• Provides 16 color-coded chapters–and a Topic Index–that can be used to quickly locate specific topics such as “place value”, “unit fractions” or “equivalent ratios”
• Incorporates videos of how to use manipulatives to connect physical models to other visual representations
• Can be used as a planning tool with your PLC, a desk-reference, a teaching tool, and a family support tool.

This guide equips you to help your students derive meaning, sense, and joy out of their mathematics learning. It helps them see math as more than “just numbers”--illustrating the ways they think and focusing on their understanding of how and why math works.