Eventually, I will start posting lesson and project plans on this blog. My goal with those is to contribute to a vibrant community of free lessons and classroom content. As I embark on this journey, I want to take a moment to call out some of my favorite blogs, websites, and math creators who offer their amazing content for free! Note that I almost never use these lessons “out of the box” and find myself hacking and reworking them to fit my style and curriculum. For each of these resources, I’ll give a link to the page, share a bit of what I love about it, and then share a favorite lesson they offer.
Henri Picciotto’s Math Education Page
This website feels like it’s frozen in 1998, but Henri keeps it up to date with regular lessons and posts. The father of Algebra Lab Gear manipulatives, he does an awesome job of connecting the physical with the abstract.
This lesson on completing the square blew my mind as a teacher, and I use my own version of it every year when teaching quadratics.
YouCubed
https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/
YouCubed is all about mathematical mindsets. All of their tasks are low-floor and high-ceiling, with an emphasis on discovery, joy and collaboration through math. I use their “week of inspirational math” tasks to start off every year and norm students on how we approach math in class.
It’s hard to pick just one favorite lesson, but I will go with The Painted Cube. I love visual growth patterns in general, and this one just has an impressively low floor and impossibly high ceiling.
Math Pickle
Math Pickle has a wonderful collection of games and puzzles to draw from. While many of them exist in the recreational regions of the math landscape, I have found ways to incorporate countless games and puzzles into my teaching and tutoring.
My personal favorite of these is Ariadne’s String, a wonderfully rich problem that gives lots of practice with the Pythagorean Theorem in puzzle form, engaging students of all levels. Plus it involves Greek Mythology, which seems to never go out of style!
dy/dan
This is Dan Meyer’s blog. To the extent that a math teacher can be famous, Dan Meyer is basically a celebrity. I’ve had the privilege of hearing him speak at a conference, and that guy just gets it. He popularized the Three Act Lesson, a format that simultaneously honors and celebrates the diversity of student thinking, while also developing the skills and vocabulary necessary for success in math classes.
My favorite Three Act Lesson is Finals Week, which I taught as my sample teach when I applied to Synapse!
Desmos & Desmos Classroom
I am an absolute Desmos fanboy. It is just a perfect graphing calculator, with an amazing feature set and limitless possibilities. At some point, I’ll post about creating art on the graphing calculator, but for now, I’ll just focus on their classroom lessons. While Desmos Classroom has sold out to Amplify, I can’t pass up on them here. I have gotten so much amazing content from them, and so much of it is still free that I can’t fault them for trying to get that money. Their interactive math lessons are so engaging, fun and sticky, I am sometimes blown away. I’ll often use one of these lessons at the start of a new unit, and find myself referencing it every time a concept comes up. It may be “bumpy vs. smooth slides” for slope, or pizzas for fractions.
I think their best use of the interactive digital platform is Marbleslides, where students attempt to create a marble run out of mathematical functions, capturing as many stars as possible. There is so much room for creativity, lots of practicing skills, and it’s just downright fun.
Mathigon Polypad
Polypad is also a part of the Amplify suite, but it’s free, baby! These virtual manipulatives are so awesome. They have all the classic manipulatives like fraction tiles, base 10 blocks and Lab Gear. I find myself using this app any time I need a visual for my class content (that isn’t a graph – always Desmos for that). But beyond the classics, they have some unusual things on there that have sparked my creativity in so many ways like tantrix tiles, pentominos and Kolam tiles, to name a few.
Which One Doesn’t Belong
https://talkingmathwithkids.com/wodb/
Which One Doesn’t Belong (WODB) problems aren’t full lessons but they are as good as it gets for warmups. There are no wrong answers, they get kids thinking, and they are a super low stakes way to bring diverse voices into the classroom. I sometimes use pre-made WODBs, but much prefer to make my own to suit the lesson of the day.
Visual Patterns
https://www.visualpatterns.org/
Like WODB, this isn’t as much a resource for lessons as an archive – this time of growth patterns. The Painted Cube mentioned above with YouCubed is one of an infinite number of visual growth patterns. These are the ultimate low-floor, high-ceiling way to build algebraic fluency in kids. The patterns can be tuned to any difficulty level, from simple linear functions all the way to recursively defined patterns that generate fractals and everything in between. In a mixed-ability classroom, nothing meets the needs of every kid quite like visual patterns.
While the beauty of these is the diversity, my favorite growth pattern has to be the staircase.
BenTeachesMath.com
Hey, maybe one day, right?
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