Introduction

Algebraic thinking should be considered a basic skill for middle school students because it is compatible with their changing, maturing intellectual capabilities. Glenda Lappan, a teacher educator and author of textbooks for the middle grades, noted consequences of this intellectual growth for school mathematics programs:

Students in middle grades are growing in their ability to reason abstractly. They become capable of generalization, abstraction, and argument in mathematics. This signals the need for programs that give students the opportunity to expand their experiences with "doing mathematics," with controlling variables and examining the consequences, with experimenting, making conjectures, and developing convincing arguments to support or disconfirm a conjecture (Lappan, 2000, p. 23).

The resources highlighted here aim to reflect students' growing mathematical capacity over the span of the middle school years. The activities and lessons, intended as supplementary materials, range from introduction to the fundamentals of algebra to work on linear functions. Uniformly, they take into consideration the preference of the middle school student for concrete models, visual representations, and interactive tasks. You will find resources on:

• Working with algebraic expressions
• Solving equations
• Understanding graphs
• Moving from patterns to rules to functions

Some are games, others are online simulations that can complement a lesson, and yet others are full-blown lesson plans. We believe you will find tasks here that motivate your students to expand their basic skills in algebra.

References

Lappan, G. (2000). Mathematics in the middle: Building a firm foundation of understanding for the future. In Mathematics Education in the Middle Grades: Proceedings of a National Convocation and Action Conferences (pp. 23-31). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

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by Terese Herrera

Terry Herrera taught math several years at middle and high school levels, then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics education. She is currently a resource specialist for the Middle School Portal. Please email any comments to msp@msteacher.org.

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Copyright June 2006 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.