 Hello, my amazing math minds and welcome to my first math tip Monday. My name is Heidi Rethmeyer and I am a staff developer at ESU 8. And my hope with this math tip Monday is to provide little snippets of information to support you in your classroom. I may introduce a resource, perhaps an activity that you can try with your students. Perhaps I'll talk about an instructional shift, especially those that are supported by the research. And certainly if you have any requests, please send those my way and I'd be happy to showcase one on a math tip Monday. This bitly will provide the Google slides where I will keep a running record of all the math tip Mondays. So for today, the resource I want to share is called OpenMiddle. It supports grades K through 12 and it was created by Robert Kaplinsky, who is a name in the math world. And I would recommend you follow him on Twitter. He's got some great resources out there. And I will come back and talk about the digital version of these activities after I show you the website. So here's the website, OpenMiddle. Again, as I mentioned, it provides a resource for kindergarten through high school. And under each grade level, you can see the different categories. You can also find those over here. In terms of the activities, what I would recommend you do first is to print out for each student the digits zero through nine. So each student should get each of those cut out individually. And you could even do this for your upper level students, though certainly your lower grade levels will want those. Your upper grade levels, perhaps you could use a individual whiteboard. Those wouldn't work well. Now the activities in OpenMiddle, I would consider them to be a low floor and a high ceiling, meaning students can access these very easily. And you can have some really rich and deep conversations about math. So let's just take a look at an example of one. So I will go to third grade and numbers of operations in base 10. And how about close to 1,000? So what this is showing you is these little spaces is where the students would put the numbers. And in this case, they'd be allowed to use their digits one through nine and only once. And then they have to place them in the boxes so that the sum is as close to 1,000 as possible. So I hope you can see how you can have a low floor and a high ceiling in this case. For the teacher, there's some hints and some answers. And often you will find there are lots of answers, which again, I love that there's not just one answer. And I would encourage you to let your students work on these collaboratively and really listen to the rich conversations. Again, these activities are really good at making their learning and their understanding and their struggles visible so that you can support them in their journey of becoming amazing math minds as well. So I'll go back to my slideshow. Someone has taken the time to take those activities and put them in Google Slides. So this link here should lead you to a Google Doc with links to those Google Slides. I know K-8 is done. I think they are still working on the high school. So if you should find yourself in a remote learning environment or perhaps you have some students who are quarantined, you can certainly use those to support those kids at home. So here are a couple other examples. This is actually a first grade example. And I used this with my niece who was going into third grade this summer and it was the first time she had experienced anything like this. And she did pretty well. I'm not sure this is what I would introduce the first time with first graders. I would maybe try with something a little simpler, but in this case they can use the digit 0 through 9 and the sum in each row and column must be the same. So if I get the sum of 8 here, I must have the sum of 8 here, here, and here. So that's really a fun puzzle for the students to work on. Here is another one where you can use the digits 1 through 9 at most each time to fill in the boxes. And I'll show you just how we did this at a particular workshop. And we had some great conversations, even as adults, about how to get something as close to 1. Could it be over 1? Could it be under 1? Which one is closer and why? In this case, we were allowed to use our calculators so that we can do some more comparisons as well. But we had to justify our answer using fractions or decimals as well. So it was, again, great conversations and a great way to make students learning visible. And here is an algebra one. So again, you can find things for K through 12. And I highly recommend you give it a shot. And listen to the kids' conversations and make it very collaborative in nature. So that is open middle. Give it a shot and let me know what you think. And I hope to see you again next week for my next Math Tip Monday. In the meantime, stay well and be kind.