Thinkmath:About

From Thinkmath

This site is open to and aimed at serving the entire K-8 mathematics teaching/learning community. Many of the ideas on this site are drawn from Think Math!, a comprehensive K-5 curriculum developed by Education Development Center (EDC) and published by School Specialty.

Our Purpose

The Think Math! Information Exchange is committed to being:

• An open-source, high-quality, active, growing, free resource, serving the K-8 education communities: researchers, teachers, coaches, teacher educators and other professional developers, school administrators, parents, mathematicians, remedial and special educators, materials developers, policymakers, test-writers....
• A central forum for sharing information and materials with the K-8 math teaching community, open to all to contribute/publish/share what they know, and free universal access to that knowledge;

We also aim to:

• Develop an active, committed, growing Think Math! community.
• Build and connect the various Think Math! communities.

Vision and Resources

Think Math! is a serious mathematics curriculum that both educates the student who comes to the subject with confidence and passion and the student who "hates math" and "is bad at math." Extensive testing shows that it is successful with a wide range of populations. The strength of the curriculum is that it allows the teacher to respond to a child's thinking. That guided focus on the child is highly successful at helping children learn the basics as well as more advanced mathematical concepts.

In addition to being a general resource for teachers K-8, the Think Math! Information Exchange specifically aims to support Think Math!.

• Getting started: It provides materials and ideas to help with the challenges that first time users have. It helps teachers understand the benefits of particular parts of the program -- which features are essential and which are optional, how to teach elements in the curriculum that are unfamiliar such as headline stories and silent teaching, how to use supporting material, and how to respond to needs particular to a class, such as weak basic skills.

• About the math: It provides information on the mathematical concepts covered in lessons. This helps teachers respond more flexibly and effectively to children's insights and questions.

• Additional material: No curriculum anticipates everything. This site provides a forum for sharing enhancements to lessons developed by individual teachers that add to the effectiveness of a lesson.

• Children's work: Think Math! is a curriculum that allows children to do mathematical research. Some directions are anticipated. However, as is true in all research sometimes children come up with unique results. This is a forum for teachers to share interesting new ideas that their children develop while using the curriculum.

• Questions and difficulties: This provides a forum for posting questions and difficulties to other teachers, developers, and mathematicians.

• Parents: Parental help with homework is a valuable resource. This site provides a place for parents to learn more about the math that their children are learning and to ask questions that enable them to support their children's learning of mathematics and not to simply be confined to helping with basic algorithms that they learned in school.