A Parent’s Guide to the Standards for Mathematical Practice

As your child works through homework exercises, you can help him/her develop and apply the eight Mathematical Practices by asking some of these questions:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

• What problem are you asked to solve?
• Have you solved similar problems?
• What is your plan for solving the problem?
• Did you use a different method to check your answer?

2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

• Can you think of a number sentence (equation) to match the story ( situation)?
• What do the numbers in the number sentence mean?
• How are the facts in the problem related to one another?

3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

• What does your answer mean?
• How can you be sure that your answer is correct?

4. Model with mathematics.

• What number sentence (equation) describes this problem?
• What numbers will you use to solve the problem?
• How are the numbers in the problem connected?
• Is your answer reasonable?
• What does your solution represent?

5. Use appropriate tools strategically.

• What tools can help you solve this problem?
• Which tool is the most useful for this problem? Why is that your choice?
• Did you begin by estimating the solution?

6. Attend to precision.

• What do the symbols that you used mean?
• What units of measure are you using?
• Explain what [term from the lesson] means.

7. Look for and make use of structure.

• What do you notice about the solutions you’ve just completed?

8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

• Are there shortcuts for solving similar problems?