Rich Math Tasks
Detailed plans for helping elementary students experience deep mathematical learning
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!
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!
With a focus on access and equity, productive struggle, alternate learning environments, and strengths spotting, each task:
- Gives a short description of the mathematical idea that will be tackled as well as extensive preparation and launch notes
- Calls out the Mathematics Standards, Mathematical Practices, and Important Vocabulary highlighted in the task
- Includes a list of the necessary materials needed to complete it
- Provides extensive facilitation notes to support educators in guiding the implementation of the task-lesson
Enriching a Math Task Using Reversibility Questions to Promote Robust Understanding
We know that students need more than practice or computational-type exercises, but some curriculum materials may emphasize procedures or algorithms rather than concepts. For students to remember and retain content, it’s important for them to see the big ideas and connections within and across topics to build conceptual understanding.
3 Ways to Build a Positive Classroom Culture Using Rich Math Tasks
"The intention behind the planning decisions have long-lasting impact for the students in our classrooms and can have vastly different implications for the culture of our classroom. Much of this culture depends on the richness of the mathematics task we choose."
3 Actions for Using Rich Math Tasks to Refresh and Rejuvenate Your Instructional Practice
"In preparing for the upcoming school year, it is a great opportunity to create a 'new normal' for the teaching and learning of mathematics. Make a plan to refresh your instructional practices with strategies and tools that help our youngest learners experience deep mathematical learning."
Leveraging Learning through Rich Math Tasks: 4 Actions to Move Learning Forward in the Wake of the Pandemic
"Lately it seems that our inboxes, news feeds, and social media streams are flooded with worrisome messages about “COVID slide” and “Learning Loss.” While it’s true that the past year has been filled with challenges, we invite teachers, parents, and other stakeholders to join us in a new mission: Let’s ditch the deficit mindset!"