Transforming the Task with Number Choice Grades K-3

The enduring challenge for every teacher is providing individual and responsive learning experiences for every student. Factor in other parts of the educator's mission--aligning teaching with content and practice standards, providing worthwhile tasks for class participation and discussion, assessing mathematical understanding and progress--and the challenge is even greater. Transforming the Task with Number Choice presents a uniquely powerful tool to accomplish these goals and more. By choosing and sequencing productive arrays of numbers for problems, you can-- meet the needs and strengths of individual learners with accessible, equitable, and differentiated math; address multiple content and practice standards; create rich, worthwhile tasks with multiple entry points; provide opportunities for students to vary their strategies and use the properties of operations; shift students' focus from merely calculating answers to examining number relationships; assess students' abilities and monitor their understanding. Choosing numbers that are "just right" is hard, but Transforming the Task with Number Choice supports and guides you by offering-- strategies for aligning problem-solving tasks with students' skills to build their understanding; examples of and strategies for using number choice to address a variety of Common Core (or other) content and practice standards; samples of work illustrating how students respond to different number choices; advice on how to focus on number choice within curricular materials tools for getting started and assessing students' work, including downloadable