I will never forget my first reaction when I read through the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Huh?

I think it took me another 5 reads to even scratch the surface of what they meant. The rest of the common core seemed like a piece of cake in comparison!

I really tried hard to understand them, but truth be told, I wasn’t sure how they fit in to my classroom. How were elementary students supposed to understand this stuff when I barely could?

As we began to implement the common core, I noticed my students struggling with the deeper problem solving concepts. I was so frustrated. I tried everything…I looked for strategies online to see if there was some kind of magic answer, I asked colleagues what they had tried and began to pull my hair out.

That was when it dawned on me…why don’t I try to incorporate the Standards for Mathematical Practice?  So I dug deep and did some research. One of my favorite things I found is from our friend Marilyn Burns (if you don’t know who this is, get to know her!). Her site is amazing, and the video series is really great.

All of the research allowed me to create a guide to introducing the standards for my students. I started with putting them into kid friendly I can statements. I added some sample problems and allowed the students to see each other’s work habits.

Voila! It was like a revolution was born. One of my students had the idea that we should post the standards on the wall, and get a point every time we had a question or gave a compliment with the language of the standard in our comment. Done! We had points like you wouldn’t believe by the end of the school year. (Incidentally the points counted toward absolutely nothing, they were just points for the sake of getting points!)

Intentionally putting the language of these math practices in our every day commentary did the trick. Students gained confidence, it was fun and best of all problem solving was no longer a stress in our classroom.