Selecting Tools & Strategies

Students develop the ability to select appropriate technologies, tools, and strategies to perform particular mathematical tasks, to investigate mathematical ideas, and to solve problems.

Tools. All students should be encouraged to select and use tools to illustrate mathematical ideas. Students come to understand that making their own representations is a powerful means of building understanding and of explaining their thinking to others. Using tools helps students:

• see patterns and relationships;

• make connections between mathematical concepts and between concrete and abstract representations;

• test, revise, and confirm their reasoning;

• remember how they solved a problem;

• communicate their reasoning to others, including by gesturing.

Strategies. Problem solving often requires students to select an appropriate strategy. Students learn to judge when an exact answer is needed and when an estimate is all that is required, and they use this knowledge to guide their selection. For example, computational strategies include mental computation and estimation to develop a sense of the numbers and operations involved. The selection of a computational strategy is based on the flexibility students have with applying operations to the numbers they are working with. Sometimes, their strategy may involve the use of algorithms or the composition and decomposition of numbers using known facts. Students can also create computational representations of mathematical situations using code.

(Ontario Elementary Math Curriculum, 2020)

Instructional Strategies

• Introduce new technology/manipulatives in ways that allow students to explore and build confidence.

• Model the use of tools.

• Demonstrate situations in which the new technology/manipulative would be an appropriate choice of tool.

• Make available a range of tools for students to use during instruction and assessment.

• Ask students to use tools to demonstrate and communicate their understanding of a skill or concept.

Prompting Questions

• You have chosen a different tool than other students. Why did you choose this one?

• How did the learning tool you chose contribute to your understanding/solving of the problem? assist in your communication?

• What other tools did you consider using? Explain why you chose not to use them.