Open Middle tasks provide opportunities for student to approach a mathematical task using different strategies and representations. They can be used as a warm-up/closing activity, as a formative assessment, or to facilitate discourse and discussion and get insite into student thinking and problem solving. These tasks provide a great opportunity for student to engage with the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Open Middle tasks provide opportunities for student to approach a mathematical task using different strategies and representations. They can be used as a warm-up/closing activity, as a formative assessment, or to facilitate discourse and discussion and get insite into student thinking and problem solving. These tasks provide a great opportunity for student to engage with the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

Open Middle tasks provide opportunities for student to approach a mathematical task using different strategies and representations. They can be used as a warm-up/closing activity, as a formative assessment, or to facilitate discourse and discussion and get insite into student thinking and problem solving. These tasks provide a great opportunity for student to engage with the Standards for Mathematical Practice.

This three-act math task utilizes videos and questioning to help students explore multiplication and division within 100.

This problem provides an opportunity for students to reason about ratio and proportion in the realistic context of mixing a fruit drink from concentrate. The Teachers' Notes page offers suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, ideas for extension and support, and links to related problems (Blackcurrantiest is cataloged separately).

The goal of this task is to look for structure and identify patterns and then try to find the mathematical explanation for this. This problem examines the ''checkerboard'' pattern of even and odd numbers in a single digit multiplication table.

This three-act math task utilizes videos and questioning to help students explore multiplication and division within 100.

This brief article describes some of the mathematics of Pythagoras and his society. It relates what they believed to be the natural significance of numbers and the well-known Pythagorean Theorem. A link to a printable page is included.

This task helps students understand that when you multiply by a number you always get a bigger number.

This interactive Flash applet allows students to explore number properties and to develop systematic search strategies in dealing with divisors and remainders. It could also provide a context for practicing multiplication facts. The user chooses a divisor and the applet arranges counters numbered 1-100 into equal rows of the chosen number. Users can then color code any column, redivide the counters, color another column, and observe the effects. A question generator provides challenges which can be answered with or without the help of the applet. The Teachers' Notes page offers suggestions for implementation, discussion, extension, and support, along with links to related applets.

This interactive activity adapted from the Wisconsin Online Resource Center challenges you to plan, measure, and calculate the correct amount of roofing material needed to reroof a house.

This activity uses Cuisenaire Rods to develop conceptual understanding of factors and multiples and to encourage systematic thinking. Users are shown a train of four different rods and asked to find equivalent trains, each made from rods of just one color. An interactive Flash Cuisenaire applet is provided as an alternative to using real rods. The Teachers' Notes page offers suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, and ideas for extension and support.

The purpose of this task is to help students see that 4_(9+2) is four times as big as (9+2). Though this task may seem very simple, it provides students and teachers with a very useful visual for interpreting an expression without evaluating it.

This three-act math task utilizes videos and questioning to help students explore multiplication and division within 100.

This open-ended investigation provides an opportunity for students to develop problem solving skills and explore patterns while applying number skills. Posed in the context of friends sending each other cards, it asks students to find how many cards are sent based on the number of friends, and to look for patterns that emerge in the results. The Teachers' Resources page offers rationale, suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, and ideas for extension and support. Be sure to check out the Solutions page to appreciate the potential range of student thinking.

This problem helps children become familiar with the idea of a symbol (in this case a shape) representing a number. Students also have an opportunity to see the multiplication properties of one and zero in a challenging puzzle. By studying the twelve multiplication equations which use eleven different colored shapes, students are to determine each shape's unique number value from a list of 0 to 12. The Teachers' Notes page offers rationale, suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, support with down loadable handouts and a link to an extension activity, What's It Worth? (cataloged separately).

The CyberSquad must divide 35 candies evenly among seven gargoyles in this video segment from Cyberchase.

In this video segment from Cyberchase, Jackie shows Buzz, Delete and Harold how to deal out rounds (or sets) of objects to solve a problem.

This activity provides students with an opportunity to recognize arithmetic sequences and at the same time reinforces identifying multiples. The interactivity displays five numbers and the student must discover the times table pattern and the numerical shift. On Levels 1 and 2, the first five numbers in the sequence are given and on Levels 3 and 4, the numbers given could be any five numbers in the sequence. The Teachers' Notes page offers rationale, suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, ideas for extension and support.

This problem asks students to visualize a square drawn on a clock face and estimate and calculate its area. The problem can be solved without use of the Pythagorean Theorem. Ideas for implementation, extension and support are included along with printable sheets of clock faces.