About the Book
Detailed plans for helping elementary students experience deep mathematical learning
Do you work tirelessly to make your math lessons meaningful, challenging, accessible, and engaging? Do you spend hours you don’t have searching for, adapting, and creating tasks to provide rich experiences for your students that supplement your mathematics curriculum? Help has arrived! Classroom Ready-Rich Math Tasks for Grades 4-5 details more than 50 research- and standards-aligned, high-cognitive-demand tasks that will have your students doing deep-problem-based learning. These ready-to-implement, engaging tasks connect skills, concepts and practices, while encouraging students to reason, problem-solve, discuss, explore multiple solution pathways, connect multiple representations, and justify their thinking. They help students monitor their own thinking and connect the mathematics they know to new situations. In other words, these tasks allow students to truly do mathematics! Written with a strengths-based lens and an attentiveness to all students, this guide includes:
• Complete task-based lessons, referencing mathematics standards and practices, vocabulary, and materials
• Downloadable planning tools, student resource pages, and thoughtful questions, and formative assessment prompts
• Guidance on preparing, launching, facilitating, and reflecting on each task
• Notes on access and equity, focusing on students’ strengths, productive struggle, and distance or alternative learning environments.
With concluding guidance on adapting or creating additional rich tasks for your students, this guide will help you give all of your students the deepest, most enriching and engaging mathematics learning experience possible.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Doing-Math Tasks: What Are They, Why Are They Important, and How Do I Plan for Implementation?
Chapter 2: Laying the Groundwork for Teaching With Doing-Math Tasks
Chapter 3: Implementing A Doing-Math Task-Based Lesson
Chapter 4: Operations and Algebraic Thinking: Expressions, Equations, and More
Chapter 5: Operations and Algebraic Thinking: Factors and Multiples
Chapter 6: Operations and Algebraic Thinking: Patterns and Relationships
Chapter 7: Number and Operations in Base Ten: It’s All About Place Value
Chapter 8: Number and Operations in Base Ten: Operations
Chapter 9: Number and Operations—Fractions: Equivalence, Comparing, and More
Chapter 10: Number and Operations—Fractions: Operations With Fractions
Chapter 11: Measurement: Knowing, Converting, Using
Chapter 12: Measurement: Represent and Interpret Data
Chapter 13: Geometric Measurement: Angles and Volume
Chapter 14: Geometry: Two-Dimensional Shapes and Symmetry
Chapter 15: Geometry: Representing Real-World Problems
Chapter 16: Your Turn
About the Author :
Beth McCord Kobett serves as Professor and Dean in the School of Education at Stevenson University, where she works closely with early childhood, elementary, and middle school preservice teachers. She brings experience as a classroom teacher, mathematics specialist, and university supervisor. Beth served on the NCTM Board and served as president of Association of Maryland Mathematics Teacher Educators. Beth has authored ten mathematics education books and supports professional learning efforts nationwide. She has been honored with awards such as the MCTM Mathematics Educator of the Year and Stevenson’s Rose Dawson Award for Excellence in Teaching. Deeply committed to her students, she strives to create a supportive, strengths-based learning environment that fosters curiosity, collaboration, and meaningful growth.
Francis (Skip) Fennell is professor of education and Graduate and Professional Studies, emeritus at McDaniel College in Maryland. He is a former classroom teacher, principal, and supervisor of instruction, and past president of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE), the Research Council on Mathematics Learning (RCML), and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). He is a recipient of the Mathematics Educator of the Year Award from the Maryland Council of Teachers of Mathematics (MCTM), the Glenn Gilbert National Leadership Award from NCSM: Leadership in Mathematics Education, the Excellence in Leadership and Service in Mathematics Teacher Education Award from AMTE, the James Heddens Distinguished Service Award from RCML, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from both MCTM and NCTM. Skip’s many publications including Achieving Fluency: Special Education and Mathematics (NCTM, 2011), and The Formative 5: In Action (Corwin, 2024) have been influenced by his classroom experiences and decades long focus on assessment, number sense, fractions, elementary mathematics specialists and teacher education.
Karen S. Karp is a mathematics educator who focuses on the intersection of mathematics education and special education. She is a former professor at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Louisville where she is professor emerita. Early in her career she received a Development Award from the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation to support more seamless integration between general education and special education. She is the author or co-author of numerous publications including Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades and Elementary and Middle School Mathematics. Karen was on the writing team of the NCTM/CEC Joint position statement on Teaching Mathematics to Students with Learning Disabilities. In 2024, she chaired the Topic Study Group on Teaching Mathematics to Students with Special Needs at the International Congress on Mathematical Education in Australia. She holds teaching/administrative certifications in elementary education, secondary mathematics, K-12 special education, and K-12 educational administration.
Delise Andrews is the 3-5 Mathematics Coordinator for Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska. During her career, she has worked in both rural and urban districts and has taught mathematics to students at every age from Kindergarten through the 8th grade, undergraduate mathematics methods and mathematics content courses for pre-service teachers, and graduate level courses for teachers of mathematics. Delise is a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching and is a Robert Noyce Master Teaching Fellow. Delise is an active member of the NCTM, serving as a past member and chair of the Professional Development Services Committee, member of regional conference committees, chair of the St. Louis annual conference committee, Professional Services facilitator, and Associate Editor for the Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching K-12 journal. She is a co-author of the Grades K-1 and Grades 4-5 books in the Classroom Ready Rich Math Tasks: Engaging Students in Doing Math series.
Review :
This book’s title reveals its promise. Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks offers teachers an abundant collection of practical challenges for engaging their students in building mathematical fluency and developing strategic reasoning—exactly what all Mathematics Standards expect.
I highly recommend this book, which provides a research-based framework for engaging in rich tasks that are connected to and build on previous mathematical understanding, relevant contexts, and students’ experiences and resources, as well as connecting to mathematics teaching practice. The 54 high cognitively demanding tasks included support the development of important mathematics norms, practices, and concepts.
This book answers the often-asked question ‘Where can I find good tasks?’ The authors have assembled a collection of rich mathematical tasks and provided guidance on how to plan and implement lessons around them in ways that will support opportunities for students to learn mathematics with understanding. This book is a game changer for 4th and 5th grade teachers who want their students to do math!
What a resource! The thoughtful and thorough task-based lesson template guides teachers to effectively plan, facilitate, and monitor tasks. I’m delighted to see the focus on planning and on closing a lesson by making the mathematics visible. Read a few of the completed templates for the 54 tasks to recognize the value of this book.
Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4–5 is an excellent resource for teachers, teacher educators, and professional development providers who want to engage students in high-level, cognitively demanding mathematics tasks. The book does an excellent job of explaining the why and the how of implementing doing mathematics tasks. To top it off, this book has a treasure trove of rich mathematics tasks for teachers to choose from.
This book is a treasure trove of excellent mathematics problems, accompanied by instructional strategies to support students with opportunities to truly do mathematics and learn new concepts through problem solving. From reading this book, teachers can learn how to notice and amplify strengths in students’ thinking, promote productive struggle, and work toward equity when enacting these tasks. I also appreciated the authors’ ideas for enacting these tasks remotely. I would love to have been a student in a classroom with these tasks!
In my years of working with teachers in professional development settings, one thing they always ask me is ‘How can we find other great tasks like the ones we did in our session?’ Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4–5: Engaging Students in Doing Math is a goldmine for teachers and mathematics educators who want to expand their bank of ‘rich tasks’ with cognitively demanding problems that help students make sense of mathematics while building their sense of agency and identity as a thinker and doer of mathematics.
This book empowers teachers by focusing on critical considerations related to doing-math tasks to promote reasoning and sense making. The lesson plan templates provide detailed pathways and insights for teachers, coaches and administrators to leverage purposefully selected tasks to achieve the standards and engage students through effective instruction.
By integrating the latest research with a powerful teacher voice, the authors have written a must-read for every teacher of mathematics who wants their students to have a more motivating and powerful classroom experience. But the authors don’t simply argue that teachers include high-cognitive demand tasks in their teaching—they take the next steps and actually demonstrate how to plan for, implement, and support these tasks so each student can authentically engage in doing mathematics!
We’ve all wondered, Where can I go to find high quality mathematics tasks? With useful guidance embedded in the 54 detailed task plans, this book successfully and rightfully responds to the complex mix of expectations that teachers encounter in their short- and long-term planning. The authors cleverly weave together so many considerations for instruction. Grab this essential resource and watch your students flourish and shine as mathematical thinkers and doers!
Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks, Grades 4–5 is a practical, high-quality resource from trusted mathematics leaders. With dozens of classroom-ready rich tasks for thinking and doing math, it helps us understand how to maximize each task with guidance for launching, facilitating, gathering evidence, representing, and making connections during lessons. Most importantly, this tool serves to advance one’s practice by helping one think task selection and implementation. It’s time to do math!
This book takes the mystery out of how to implement rich, engaging tasks. It supports teachers with appropriately facilitating productive struggle and formative assessment through strengths spotting, and includes loads of fantastically written tasks. No longer will teachers need to hunt for tasks to utilize in their classrooms or struggle with how to structure environments that promote deep learning.
This book is more than just a collection of top-notch ready-to-implement tasks—it provides powerful ideas for launching, facilitating, and closing the tasks in ways that will truly benefit your students and support their conceptual understanding of key mathematical ideas. To top it off, the lists of additional resources to further your professional learning are incredibly helpful.
Classroom-Ready Rich Math Tasks sets the stage for engaging students in doing meaningful mathematics, which leads to deep, well-connected mathematics learning. These tasks promote students as active mathematicians. Readers get classroom-tested tasks and formative assessments that help teachers monitor students’ learning, which can lead to better student growth.
Merging research and practice, this book details the what, why, and how of mathematics task implementation. Compiling over 50 worthwhile tasks, this valuable book offers practical suggestions for teachers to maximize their facilitation of effective student-centered learning experiences. This book is immediately useful as it integrates online strategies with considerations of equity so every child can access powerful mathematics experiences.
We know how important mathematics is for student success in life—it truly is a gateway to practically any occupation or personal usage. This book is a phenomenal resource that supplies numerous examples of how to equitably get our students through the gateway.
For far too long, we have searched for great doing-math tasks that aligned with our standards and often found that finding a task alone was not enough. In this book, the authors have given us standards aligned doing-math tasks WITH a vital rationale for the pedagogical actions necessary for their successful implementation. At last, our field has a helpful resource for planning and enacting impactful instruction, building on the important connections between content and process, norms, teaching moves, and the doing-math tasks that fully engage students in meaningful learning.
What a wonderful resource for how to successfully use tasks to authentically engage students in mathematical thinking and reasoning! Its concrete suggestions for planning and teaching task-centered lessons, including the question of alignment to standards to create a cohesive program of study, are a tremendous gift to us all. A great choice for a teacher book club or study group!
