Promoting Relational Thinking in the Early Grades

Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Time: 4:00-5:30 PM Hawaii / 7:00-8:30 PM Pacific / 9:00-10:30 PM Central / 10:00-11:30 PM Eastern

Venue: Online Via Zoom

Cost: $25 (Includes a digital download of Who Has More? The Great Flood)

(Scholarships available! Please inquire here.)

Math picture books can be fun and effective tools to introduce and explore mathematics concepts without being overly technical. Journey with us through the characters' eyes to investigate and solve measurement questions. We will extend our exploration through related activities and share how this use of math picture books can be transferred to your classroom.

Math problem solving activities in the early grades are often tied to the development of number sense and the associated progression of concepts. Math picture books can expose students to a wider diversity of concepts and create access to complex ideas such as the transitive property (i.e., if A > B and B > C, then A >C), while providing an engaging context. The math focus of this session is on properties of comparison––equality, inequality, transitivity, and reversibility. We will have participants use relational symbols (=, ≠, <, >) to capture observations found in a measurement context (i.e., pouring liquid to compare volume, laying side-by-side to compare length) and have them deductively reason about additional relationships. We will then extend these properties to numeric examples and have participants articulate associated generalizations.