We support this philosophy with several other “big ideas”: Town teachers never stop honing their skills. At regular math planning meetings, they collaborate as grade-level or divisional teams, read the latest professional literature and discuss best practices, review a particular strand of math in other grade levels’ curriculum to ensure alignment, and check in on personal goals around the practice of teaching math. They also pursue professional development to deepen their conceptual grasp of the math they teach. We keep math in the real world—from Nursery 4 students divvying up snacks to 6th graders developing a real-life budget. As students move into 8th grade Algebra, we balance this approach with strong preparation for the slightly more traditional classes they will likely see in high school. At the same time, our teachers do not shy away from the rigor of algorithms and mathematical models.
We encourage “cognitive discomfort.” Our brains feel uncomfortable when we look at a problem and don’t immediately understand how to solve it. That discomfort is where profound learning and new neural pathways are born! We discourage students from erasing mistakes—the entire journey is important—and often require them to share or document their failures right along with their final successful outcomes. Town teachers also pursue the experience of cognitive discomfort themselves through professional development experiences. We collaborate. Students engage in a lot of small-group work in math lessons. Though we take care to provide additional instruction or challenges as needed, we also ensure that the full class comes back together to discuss a concept or unit, as everyone builds their own knowledge from hearing different understandings, strategies, and pathways to solving problems.
Town Math Year by Year N3 & N4 Number Sense Representation Measurement (length, height, & weight) Spatial Sense (shapes, attributes, space, position) Patterns (size, shape, & pattern) Estimation (more than & less than) K & 1st Grade Number & Operations, Whole Numbers, Addition & Subtraction Measurement Geometry Patterns & Functions Data Analysis 2nd Grade Number & Operations, Whole Numbers, Fractions Measurement
Are You Smarter than a 7th Grader?
SEE IF YOU CAN SOLVE THIS 7TH GRADE “PROBLEM OF THE WEEK”:
Geometry Patterns & Functions Data Analysis 3rd–5th Grades
A farmer is taking her eggs to market in her cart. Along the way, she hits a pothole, which jars her cart and spills the eggs. Though the farmer is unhurt, every egg is broken. So she goes to her insurance agent, who asks her how many eggs she had. She doesn’t know, but she does remember some things from various ways she tried packing the eggs. She knows that when she put the eggs in groups of two, there was one egg left over. When she put them in groups of three, there was also one egg left over. The same thing happened when she put them in groups of four, groups of five, or groups of six. But when she put them in groups of seven, she ended up with complete groups of seven, with no eggs left over. • What can you figure out from this information about how many eggs the farmer had? • Is there more than one possibility? • What would you do if you were the insurance agent? To check your work against our students visit thetownschool.org/Currents
Numbers & Operations, Whole Numbers, Positive Rational Numbers Geometry & Measurement Patterns, Functions & Change Data Analysis 6th & 7th Grades Multi-step Operations with Integers & Rational Numbers Geometry Ratios & Proportional Relationships Algebraic Expressions & Equations Statistics & Probability 8th Grade Leveled Algebra Arithmetic with Polynomials & Rational Functions Creating and Applying Equations & Systems of Equations Reasoning with Equations & Inequalities Expressions
thetownschool.org
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