Back to School – Math Edition
It might be time to think about renaming my blog, because I’m really excited about teaching math this year! It all started when I read the book Number Talks over the summer.

I’ve always understood the importance of mental math and computation strategies, but I’d never really understood how to teach it. It felt like something kids either had or they didn’t. This year, however, I decided that we’d start doing number talks from day #1, and I’m already blown away by how my students are developing as mathematical thinkers. They’re able to solve complicated addition problems in their heads — no paper allowed — and they’re articulating their strategies well. I’ve been introducing a new strategy every 2-3 days, and it’s been awesome. We’ll be moving on to subtraction strategies in a few days, and I have high expectations for that to.
To help students with the mental math strategies, I made a set of posters that describe each strategy with an example of how it works. There are 20 posters in all — one for each strategy described in the book.

The complete set is available in my TpT store, and they’ll be on sale for 28% off this weekend as part of the Teachers Pay Teachers back to school sale if you use the code BTS13.

- You may use any combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and/or division
- You may combine numbers, e.g., use 2 of the fours to make the number 44
- You may insert decimal points
- You may use a four as an exponent
- You may use square roots
- You may use factorials, e.g., 4! is equivalent to 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24
- You may use overbars to make a decimal repeat
- You may NOT use any digit other than a four
- You MUST use all four 4’s in each solution



Hope everyone had a great week! I’m still learning how to juggle grad school with teaching, but I’m hopeful that I’ll still be posting at least once a week.
Off to start catching up on blog reading and filling my cart for the TpT sale! Have a great weekend!