This site is designed to help mathematics departments implement courses for elementary teachers. The emphasis is on ease-of-use for mathematics department instructors (especially those who have not previously taught such courses), and relevance to K-8 teaching.

 

Most features (the Instructor's Manual, Sample Exams, Problem Catalogs, and Exam Generator) are compatible with many of the standard textbooks for mathematics courses for K-8 teachers (listed and rated on pages 76-77 of the NCTQ document No Common Denominator). However, the material is most compatible with Elementary Mathematics for Teachers and Elementary Geometry for Teachers by Parker and Baldridge. These textbooks, more than most, cover elementary mathematics in a form that is immediately useful in classrooms. These books incorporate recent insights into what knowledge is especially useful to teachers , and are structured in a manner that mathematics faculty and teaching assistants will find familiar, easy to implement, and appealing. The central innovation is to base the course on the study of the exceptionally-clear elementary school textbooks from Singapore.

 

This site began as an originally developed with NSF funding by the Mathematics Departments of Louisiana State University and Michigan State University. The current site continues with the same aim: to strengthen the mathematics preparation of K-8 teachers by supporting college faculty and instructors who design and teach mathematics courses for elementary teachers.