Hi {{custom.firstName}},

Welcome to Unit 5! (Please help us out with some feedback on Unit 4 before it drifts too far in your memory.)

You’ll receive four emails from us throughout this unit, each one offering you ideas for celebrating and developing student thinking.

All of us are smarter than any one of us.

The lesson synthesis question in More Floats and Anchors is a big one!

Use the floats and anchors scenario to explain why it makes sense that 0 - (-5) is equivalent to 0 + 5.

After two lessons of floats and anchors, I suspect your students will have lots of different ideas about this question.

For example, some students might say something like, “Removing anchors is like adding floats.” Other students might answer abstractly, saying, “If you get rid of negative five, it is basically just adding positive five to that number.” Consider capturing and presenting snapshots of both types of answers and sharing them with your class. After presenting their ideas, consider inviting several students to share an idea that was new for them or one that made them see the situation in a different way.

Students often come to believe that every question in math class has one right answer with one right phrasing and only a small number of people in the class can know it. By highlighting the values of several different student ideas, you’ll help your students understand the math, and also how much math we can learn from each other.

Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team

PS. Please give us feedback on the last lesson.

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