COURSE OVERVIEW

This course centers on children's thinking in mathematics and classroom practices that support and develop children's thinking. We will focus on developing frameworks that will enable you to make sense of children's strategies for solving problems that involve operating with whole numbers. We will investigate what it means for children to understand place value, the structure of our base 10 number system, and the meaning of the four operations. Our goal for each of the mathematical ideas is to understand how tasks and classroom practices can be structured to elicit student thinking and how the learning environment can support the development of students' mathematical ideas. In particular, you will learn how to use 3 number sense routines in your classroom to help children develop their computational fluency.

Much of the work that we will engage in together may be quite new to you. We ask that you approach this class with a curiosity about how children think mathematically and that you allow yourself to question and explore your role as a teacher in a mathematics classroom.

This class will familiarize you current mathematics standards and curricula. You will be able to examine the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) revised Standards and the Washington State Essential Learnings. We will also analyze segments of current curricula used in the many of the local districts in the Puget Sound area.