This collection from NRICH provides activities to help learners think and work like a mathematician. Tasks have students exploring, questioning, working systematically, visualizing, conjecturing, explaining, generalizing and justifying. Activities are organized under specific strategies and processes.

This lesson is to teach the problem-solving strategy using the CUBES acronym. The students will use digital photos to create real-life story problems of their own and practice using the CUBES strategy to solve the problems they create as well as those of their peers.

This activity gives students practice naming and using shape and color attributes to create patterned sequences. The first challenge asks students to use attribute differences to extend a sequence. A second, more open-ended challenge asks students to maximize the length of their sequences under a further constraint. An interactive applet is provided as an alternative to physical manipulatives. The Teachers' Notes page includes suggestions for implementation and discussion questions.

This article offers advice to educators on developing learners' collaboration skills through problem solving. The author presents six categories of tasks, each of which addresses a set of teamwork skills (e.g. listening, sharing, reflecting) and includes several tasks which could serve as the vehicle. Links to the tasks, printable materials, and other resources are included.

This is a lesson plan for third grade students. Students will choose one math skill or concept they learned this year and come up with a real world example of that concept. For example, finding the perimeter of their yard for a fence. They will create a three scene storyboard and then act out their storyboard. With the help of the teacher, they will film this example and later share it with the class. Students will peer review each others videos and participate in a discussion about the topic.  

These 10 strategy games from around the world develop spatial skills and strategic thinking. Two of them include interactive versions, but all can be played with simple materials indoors or out.

This problem challenges children to make sense of information presented by applying their knowledge of number properties and to make and test conjectures based on that information. Students try to determine the secret number property or rule by examining the numbers that fit the rule and the numbers that don't fit the rule. The Teachers' Notes page offers rationale, suggestions for implementation, discussion questions, ideas for extension and support and a link to an interactivity of the game.

In this logic activity, students must determine how to represent three quantities using a fixed amount of space (Venn diagram) and objects. The goal is to represent the siblings’ ages, 5,6, and 7, using only ten plants. This resource includes teacher notes with extension suggestions and possible support options.

This problem offers a simple context to begin an exploration of the properties of numbers and to make conjectures about those properties. Learners explore the sums of consecutive numbers and whether all positive numbers from 1-30 can be written as the sum of two or more consecutive numbers. The Teachers' Notes page offers suggestions for implementation, key discussion questions, ideas for extension and support.

In this activity learners explore the connections of digital time displays with numeric and geometric properties. Students look for times that have bilateral or rotational symmetry, or have a certain digital sum, etc. Ideas for implementation, extension and support are included.