As students progress from working with whole numbers to working with integers, they must wrestle with the big ideas of number values and order. Using objects to show positive quantities is easy, but no physical negative quantities exist. Therefore, when talking about integers, the author refers to number values instead of number quantities. The…

Early elementary school students are expected to solve twelve distinct types of word problems. A math researcher and two teachers pose a structure for thinking about one problem type that has not been studied as closely as the other eleven. In this article, the authors share some of their discoveries with regard to the variety of…

Each year, more teachers learn about the successful intervention program known as Math Recovery (USMRC 2008; Wright 2003). The program uses Steffe's whole-number schemes to model, understand, and support children's development of whole-number reasoning. Readers are probably less familiar with Steffe's fraction schemes, which have proven similarly…