John A. Van de Walle

The calculator activities alone are worth the price of the book. This book should be required reading for anyone who teaches Mathematics in Elementary School. Van de Walle provides the rationale for a paradigm shift in Mathematics instruction that runs counter to many unfortunate common practices.

The main idea is that students develop a broad relational understanding of Mathematics only when they learn concepts and procedures in relationship to models, and when encouraged to demonstrate and show more practice their understandings in a variety of ways. Students with only a surface level understanding of the number 7 might only see it in relationship to a counting procedure. Students with a relational understanding have learned to see it as 2 more than 5 or 3 less than 10, or that 10 7's are 70, that 7 is part of the set of Odd Numbers, or that there are 7 days in a week. show less