MEDU530 K-5 - Resources & Tasks

Resources & Tasks

There are lots of great mathematics tasks out there, and it is often a more effective use of your time to make good tasks even better than to develop tasks from scratch. In other words, it’s smarter to make use of resources available to you than to try to design your own curriculum! Even if you end up creating your own task for this assignment, looking at examples of tasks that can be used with students across different grade levels should help you think about what is appropriate for a family STEM night.

How can I develop a task for students with such different math backgrounds?

When working with students with diverse mathematical backgrounds, you want to use a task that has a low floor, but a high ceiling. These low floor, high ceiling tasks are ones that ALL students can access (i.e., the entry point is a low floor) but that can be extended to high levels (i.e., the ceiling is high!) Such tasks are useful for family STEM nights because they ensure that all students can get started and engage with the mathematics of the task, and they challenge students who are ready to think about more advance mathematical ideas. These tasks also work well in classroom settings because all classes are diverse! Using low floor, high ceiling tasks allow students to work at different paces and take work to different depths at different times (adapted from youcubed.org and nrich.maths.org).

How will I know if a task has a low floor and a high ceiling?

Some indicators that a task is LFHC:

The work involved in the problem is more important than the answer itself. (In other words, the process matters more than the answer.)
All students can access the problem because…there are multiple ways to get started, there are multiple strategies that students might use, there are multiple right answers, or there is a visual or a concrete model that helps students make sense of the problem, etc.
There is room for students to explore more math concepts at a higher level because…the task can’t simply be solved by using a straightforward algorithm, once the task is solved, the answer inspires additional questions that could be answered with mathematics, or the task could be used with students across grade levels, etc.
The task promotes rich mathematical discourse because...students need to talk about their thinking and work together to solve the task, students might disagree about the answer or approach, or the strategy for solving the task is not immediately clear, etc.

Where can I find some tasks that have a low floor and high ceiling?

https://illuminations.nctm.org/
https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/
https://nrich.maths.org/12631
http://www.nctm.org/publications/worlds/default.aspx?id=75520
http://francesharper.com
http://www.insidemathematics.org/problems-of-the-month
Teaching Children Mathematics or Teaching Mathematics in the Middle School are NCTM journals with lots of resources for rich tasks available for free at https://www.lib.utk.edu/
https://mtbos.org/mtbos-search-engine/ - There is an amazing online network of teachers of mathematics who blog and tweet about their classroom practice. You can search for blogs that focus on specific things, like elementary mathematics, specific mathematics topics, or contexts for mathematics tasks.

Where can I find some examples of math lessons that build on community experiences and resources?

This site has several examples of math lessons that prospective teachers, like yourself, developed following a community walk. You can also find lessons from previous cohorts who took MEDU 530 on my website. Teaching Children Mathematics also has great examples.

What about making STEM connections?

The NCTM journal Teaching Children Mathematics as a section called iSTEM. The activities described in this section are a great place to start!

We also have various materials that you can use to develop a STEM-connected activity, and many of the companies who produce these materials produce lesson plans, activities, or tips for using the materials with different age groups.

Do you have examples of past lessons?

I do! You can find them here. You'll notice that the lesson plan template I used in the past was slightly different, but these should give you an idea of what other teacher candidates have done.