Educators have asked me a variety of questions about using the Use Your Math Power books.  I put together this set of ideas.  I’d love input from any of you, especially based on experiences with the books.  I’d like to make these ideas more accessible to users.  Here is what I have so far:

Suggestions for using the books with students:

• To model student discourse and perseverance in solving cognitively demanding problems.
• To model students using the Standards for Math Practice as they learn together.
• To discuss how the characters in the books share their thinking about unfamiliar problems.
• To reflect on use of the Standards for Math Practice in your classroom.

These books focus on the practices by showing students discussing a math problem. This table can help you coordinate each book with a time of year when students have had relevant experiences with the math content.

	Monkeys for the Zoo	Penguins on Parade	Hatching Butterflies
K	Mid – End of year: Extend & support thinking in K.OA2 & K.OA3; Supports strategies for sums thru 10 but uses sum of 13
1	Early – End of year; Focus: 1.OA1 & 1.OA.3; Once Ss are familiar with “Put Together Take Apart”* problems with “Total Unknown”* for sums over 10	Mid – End of year; Focus:1.NBT.2 & 1.NBT.4; Once Ss are familiar with counting by tens, counting on, and seeing tens and ones in a teen number	Mid – End of year; Focus: 1.OA.1 & 1.OA.6; Once Ss are familiar with “Add To”* problems with result unknown for sums over 10
2 & up	Anytime in year; Focus: 2.OA1 & 2.OA.2; Reinforces work with “Put Together Take Apart”* problems with “Both Addends Unknown”* for sums over 10	Anytime in year; Focus:1.NBT.1 & 1.NBT.5; Reinforces concepts about tens and ones in fluency adding one digit numbers to two digit numbers	Anytime in year; Focus: 2.OA.1 & 2.NBT.5; Reinforces work with “Add To” problems with “Change Unknown” for sums over 20

First Reading:

Pre-read:

• Have students think about a time when they worked on an unfamiliar math problem.
  • What was that like?
  • What helped you?
• Optional: Do or think about the math problem in the book*

Read the story and discuss:

• What was the story about? Any surprises?
• What did the characters do? What were they feeling? Why?

Subsequent Readings

Discuss how the characters engage in math class. Draw connections to your own class. Suggested questions:

• What does Ms. Green mean when she tells her students to use their math power?
• How do Ms. Green’s students use their math power?
• Think about our class. How do we use our math power? How can we use our math power even more?

Support your students in discussing:

• How the characters discuss what they notice and wonder about unfamiliar problems
• How the characters use retelling, acting out, and visualizing to make sense of problems and find entry points for solving them
• How the characters develop problem solving strategies using a variety of tools and modeling

Also reread portions of a book to focus on issues coming up in your class. For example:

• What if your students are shy about explaining their ideas?
  • Monkeys for the Zoo focuses on Mia who works up her courage to share her ideas. In all of the books, we see the characters figuring out how to share their thinking.
• What if your students are reticent to ask questions?
  • Hatching Butterflies focuses on Carlos and Hannah who figure out how to ask each other questions to help them work together. The characters model asking questions in the other books too.
• What about students who have trouble working together?
  • Hatching Butterflies shows how Carlos and Hannah learn to share their thinking in ways that helps both of them learn. Penguins on Parade shows how Zoe helps Trevor see that they can work together to figure out how to do a problem.
• What if your students have trouble persevering to figure out how to work with a problem?
  • Penguins on Parade shows how Trevor learns that he can figure out strategies to solve problems without a teacher showing him a strategy.

This chart shows the  practices appearing in each book.  It may help you focus on particular practices.  Pages 30 and 31 in each book give more details.

Standards of Mathematical Practice	Monkeys for the Zoo	Penguins on Parade	Hatching Butterflies
1. “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them”	yes	yes	yes
2. “reason abstractly and quantitatively”		yes	yes
3. “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others”	yes	yes	yes
4. “model with mathematics”	yes		yes
5. “uses appropriate tools strategically”	yes	yes	yes
6. “attend to precision”	yes	yes	yes
7. “look for and make use of structure”		yes	yes
8.   “look for repeated reasoning”	yes	yes