Synopses & Reviews
The first three volumes of this popular series
help teachers support children's development in number sense and operation, from addition and subtraction through fractions, decimals, and percents.
Catherine Twomey Fosnot and
Maarten Dolk's signature approach uses classroom vignettes to illustrate the investigations and minilessons students engage in as they build their mathematical knowledge.
The hallmarks of their approach include:
- Supporting children as they construct mathematical strategies and big ideas
- Creating realistic contexts and representational models that develop children's capacity to mathematize their world
- Building a collaborative community of mathematical thinkers engaged in inquiry
For the fourth volume Catherine teams up with Bill Jacob to offer a comfortably familiar and characteristically rich extension to the earlier work. In Constructing Algebra Catherine and Bill provide a landscape of learning that helps teachers recognize, support, and celebrate their students' capacity to structure their worlds algebraically. They identify for teachers the models, contexts, and landmarks that facilitate algebraic thinking in young students.
This volume will be a welcome resource for classroom teachers, math supervisors, and curriculum coordinators alike. Preparing young children for success in algebra is a crucial topic. Constructing Algebra provides the insightful and practical methods from the most trusted source for teaching mathematics to young students from Kindergarten through grade 8.
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"When children are given the chance to structure number and operation in their own way, they can make sense of algebra not as a funny set of rules that mixes up letters and numbers but as a language for describing the structure and relationships they uncover." -Catherine Twomey Fosnot and Bill Jacob
Synopsis
In our efforts to reform mathematics education, we've learned a tremendous amount about young students' strategies and the ways they construct knowledge, without fully understanding how to support such development over time. The Dutch do. So, funded by the National Science Foundation and ExxonMobil, Mathematics in the City was begun, a collaborative inservice project that pooled the best thinking from both countries. In Young Mathematicians at Work, Catherine Fosnot and Maarten Dolk reveal what they learned after several years of intensive study in numerous urban classrooms.
In this third volume in a series of three, Fosnot and Dolk focus on how children in grades 5-8 construct their knowledge of fractions, decimals, and percents. Their book: describes and illustrates what it means to do and learn mathematics. contrasts word problems with true problematic situations which support and enhance investigation and inquiry. provides strategies to help teachers turn their classrooms into math workshops. explores the cultural and historical development of fractions, decimals, and their equivalents and the ways in which children develop similar ideas and strategies. defines and gives examples of modeling, noting the importance of context. discusses calculation using number sense and the role of algorithms in computation instruction. describes how to strengthen performance and portfolio assessment. focuses on teachers as learners by encouraging them to see themselves as mathematicians.
About the Author
Catherine Twomey Fosnot is the Founding Director of Mathematics in the City and former Professor of Education at The City College of the City of New York. She has twice received the "best writing" award from AERA's Constructivist SIG and she was the recipient of the "young scholar" award by Educational Communication and Technology Journal. She is the lead author of the Contexts for Learning Mathematics series as well as the Young Mathematicians at Work series.Bill Jacob is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to his mathematical research, he develops and teaches courses for pre-service teachers. He is coauthor with Catherine Fosnot of Young Mathematicians at Work: Constructing Algebra and has been a collaborator with Mathematics in the City for twelve years.