Wouldn’t it be great to have lots of  instructional materials that help us develop contexts to engage students in puzzling through math problems.  I’ve found that Cathy Fosnot’s Contexts for Learning Mathematics units do just that. http://www.contextsforlearning.com/

For those of you not familiar with these materials, they include units for K – 6, each taking about 2 – 3 weeks, and using activities, games, and mini-lessons to develop grade level concepts and skills.

Discourse is an essential component of each of these units.  As students investigate a unit’s context and questions, they share their findings and reason together in pairs and in whole class discussions.  Each unit guides teachers in facilitating the discourse, referred to as “Math Congress”, suggesting questions and representations that engage students  in making sense of the math. Discourse is also an important part of the wonderful number string work in these materials.  In these number strings students work together to make sense of related problems that designed to strengthen students’ mental computation skills.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working with teachers and students with the following units (for descriptions click here ):

Bunk Beds and Apple Boxes in K

Organizing and Collecting in 1st grade

The Double Decker Bus also in 1st grade

Ages and Timelines in 2nd grade

The Big Dinner in 3rd grade

Muffles’ Truffles also in 3rd grade

Field Trips and Fund-Raisers in 4th and 5th grades

The California Frog-Jumping Contest in 5th grade

It was actually work in these units in a first grade that led me to write my Use Your Math Power books demonstrating students engaging in productive math discourse.