The activities in this book are designed to support you in meeting the following process standards for students in grades 3–5 recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM):

• Problem Solving - The activities promote a problem-solving approach to learning. Throughout the book, you’ll find suggestions for encouraging students to develop, apply, and explain their problem-solving strategies.

• Reasoning & Proof - Suggestions in the last step of each activity can serve as prompts to help students draw logical conclusions, explain and justify their thinking, and “pull it together” to make sense of the mathematics skills and concepts they’ve just used. Activities encourage students to use patterns and relationships as they work.

• Communication - Activities include ideas for helping students organize and consolidate their mathematical thinking through class discussions and writing connections.

• Connections - Activities tie to the real world, to the interests of third-grade students, and to other areas of the curriculum. The purpose of many activities is to bridge conceptual and procedural knowledge, and to bridge different topics in mathematics.

Representation - Students use manipulatives, pictures and diagrams, and numerical representations to
complete the activities.

A grid is provided that shows how the activities correlate to the other math standards for grades 3–5.