By Jill Newton, Sarah Kasten

Make the Connection: Activities to Engage Your Students in Reasoning and Sense Making
If you are a high school mathematics teachers looking for new ways to engage your students in developing solid reasoning habits, this book is for you. Selected from NCTM’s acclaimed journal Mathematics Teacher, this book is a collection of articles and activities rooted in a wide variety of content areas and levels of mathematics, such as maximizing volume and linear regression. Each article includes activities for teachers to use with their students to promote the understanding of the mathematical content featured in the article.

The editors’ goal for the book is to give teacher activities to engage in key reasoning habits. The book’s chapters are organized by the content areas in Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making: (1) Number and Measurement; (2) Algebraic Symbols (3) Functions; (4) Geometry (5) Statistics and Probability. Each chapter contains an introduction, a table listing related articles and activities from Mathematics Teacher, summarizing their features; and the articles and activities themselves. Extra articles and other content can be accessed via NCTM’s More4U website (www.nctm.org/more4u) .

Emphasizing reasoning and sense making in the high school classroom can show students how to organize their knowledge in ways to promote the understanding of number sense, algebraic fluency, functional relationships and other key mathematical concepts. Students who can connect what they have just learned with their previous knowledge are more likely to retain it rather than being taught in isolated lessons without being taught the connections. This book gives teachers tested and tried activities to increase their students’ use of reasoning and sense making and foster real understanding and meaning of mathematical lessons.