Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4-5
Engaging Students in Doing Math
- Beth McCord Kobett - Stevenson University
- Francis (Skip) Fennell - McDaniel College, USA
- Karen S. Karp - Johns Hopkins University
- Delise Andrews - Lincoln Public Schools, Nebraska
- Sorsha-Maria T. Mulroe - Howard County Public Schools
Corwin Mathematics Series
Do you work tirelessly to make your math lessons meaningful, challenging, accessible, and engaging? Do you spend hours you don’t have searching for, adapting, and creating tasks to provide rich experiences for your students that supplement your mathematics curriculum? Help has arrived! Classroom Ready-Rich Math Tasks for Grades 4-5 details more than 50 research- and standards-aligned, high-cognitive-demand tasks that will have your students doing deep-problem-based learning. These ready-to-implement, engaging tasks connect skills, concepts and practices, while encouraging students to reason, problem-solve, discuss, explore multiple solution pathways, connect multiple representations, and justify their thinking. They help students monitor their own thinking and connect the mathematics they know to new situations. In other words, these tasks allow students to truly do mathematics! Written with a strengths-based lens and an attentiveness to all students, this guide includes:
• Complete task-based lessons, referencing mathematics standards and practices, vocabulary, and materials
• Downloadable planning tools, student resource pages, and thoughtful questions, and formative assessment prompts
• Guidance on preparing, launching, facilitating, and reflecting on each task
• Notes on access and equity, focusing on students’ strengths, productive struggle, and distance or alternative learning environments.
With concluding guidance on adapting or creating additional rich tasks for your students, this guide will help you give all of your students the deepest, most enriching and engaging mathematics learning experience possible.
Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4–5 is a practical, high-quality resource from trusted mathematics leaders. With dozens of classroom-ready rich tasks for thinking and doing math, it helps us understand how to maximize each task with guidance for launching, facilitating, gathering evidence, representing, and making connections during lessons. Most importantly, this tool serves to advance one’s practice by helping one think task selection and implementation. It’s time to do math!
This book takes the mystery out of how to implement rich, engaging tasks. It supports teachers with appropriately facilitating productive struggle and formative assessment through strengths spotting, and includes loads of fantastically written tasks. No longer will teachers need to hunt for tasks to utilize in their classrooms or struggle with how to structure environments that promote deep learning.
This book is more than just a collection of top-notch ready-to-implement tasks—it provides powerful ideas for launching, facilitating, and closing the tasks in ways that will truly benefit your students and support their conceptual understanding of key mathematical ideas. To top it off, the lists of additional resources to further your professional learning are incredibly helpful.
Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks sets the stage for engaging students in doing meaningful mathematics, which leads to deep, well-connected mathematics learning. These tasks promote students as active mathematicians. Readers get classroom-tested tasks and formative assessments that help teachers monitor students’ learning, which can lead to better student growth.
Merging research and practice, this book details the what, why, and how of mathematics task implementation. Compiling over 50 worthwhile tasks, this valuable book offers practical suggestions for teachers to maximize their facilitation of effective student-centered learning experiences. This book is immediately useful as it integrates online strategies with considerations of equity so every child can access powerful mathematics experiences.
We know how important mathematics is for student success in life—it truly is a gateway to practically any occupation or personal usage. This book is a phenomenal resource that supplies numerous examples of how to equitably get our students through the gateway.
For far too long, we have searched for great doing-math tasks that aligned with our standards and often found that finding a task alone was not enough. In this book, the authors have given us standards aligned doing-math tasks WITH a vital rationale for the pedagogical actions necessary for their successful implementation. At last, our field has a helpful resource for planning and enacting impactful instruction, building on the important connections between content and process, norms, teaching moves, and the doing-math tasks that fully engage students in meaningful learning.
What a wonderful resource for how to successfully use tasks to authentically engage students in mathematical thinking and reasoning! Its concrete suggestions for planning and teaching task-centered lessons, including the question of alignment to standards to create a cohesive program of study, are a tremendous gift to us all. A great choice for a teacher book club or study group!
