The Contexts for Learning Mathematics Teacher Pack: Grades 3–4 contains 1 Getting Started guide, 3 unit books, and 9 context-setting posters.
The 3 unit books and their related posters are:
Unit Book: The Big Dinner: Multiplication with the Ratio Table
2 Posters: The Turkey, The Big Dinner
In The Big Dinner the preparation of a turkey dinner introduces early multiplication strategies and supports automatizing the facts, using the ratio table, and developing the distributive property with large numbers. Strings of problems guide learners toward computational fluency with whole-number multiplication and build automaticity with multiplication facts by focusing on relationships.
Unit Book: Muffles’ Truffles: Multiplication and Division with the Array
3 Posters: Muffles’ Truffles Shop, The Big Mix-Up, Muffles’ New Boxes
A chocolatier’s efforts to cope with the operational challenges of running a truffle shop (counting, pricing, and labeling assorted boxes of chocolates) in Muffles’ Truffles introduces students to the open array as a model for multiplication and division. A series of investigations explore place value—the multiplicative structure of our base-ten system and quotative division—and big ideas in multiplication, including the distributive, associative, and commutative properties.
Unit Book: The Teachers’ Lounge: Place Value and Division
4 Posters: The Water Machine, The Juice Machine, The Iced-Tea Machine, Amusement Park Ride Tickets
The stocking of water and juice vending machines in The Teachers’ Lounge introduces big ideas related to division. As students consider different ways to inventory the contents of each machine, they employ a repertoire of strategies, including the use of the ten-times strategy, partial products and partial quotients, the associative property, and the distributive property of multiplication over addition—the basis for the long-division algorithm.
Part of the 