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Listed below are some terms and types of activities your child uses in Everyday Mathematics.

Minute Math is a convenient pocket-size book containing brief mental problem-solving activities and puzzles.

A piggy bank contains 5 pennies, 2 nickels, 1 dime, and 1 quarter. How many different kinds of coins are in it? (4 different kinds)

A mother hen has 7 chicks, and 5 of these chicks are black. The others are yellow. How many chicks are yellow? (2 are yellow)

5-Minute Math is in many lessons for older students. These tasks strengthen students' number sense, provide review, and solidify mathematical knowledge.

Frames and Arrows, or chains, are diagrams that are used to represent number sequences--sets of numbers that are ordered according to a rule. These diagrams consist of frames connected to arrows to show the path for moving from one frame to another. Each frame contains a number in the sequence; each arrow represents a rule that determines what number goes in the next frame.

Games furnish the opportunity for frequent practice that is necessary to attain mastery of a skill. Because children enjoy the games, the practice of a skill is less tedious. Besides building fact and operations skills, games reinforce other skills: calculator usage, money exchange and shopping, logic, geometric intuition, and probability and chance intuition.

Games also reduce the need for worksheets, a form of practice that students perform in every subject. Because the numbers in most games are randomly generated, the games can be played over and over without repeating the same problems. Many games have variations suggested that allow players to progress from easy to more challenging versions.

Math Boxes are a marvelous way to review material on a regular basis. They consist of a series of cells (three at the beginning of the early grades, six or more in the higher grades) containing brief review activities.

Many teachers begin the day with a morning mathematics message written on the board, overhead projector, or a piece of paper to be completed by the children as they arrive at school. The messages may consist of problems to solve, directions to follow, tasks to complete, notes to copy, sentences to complete or correct, or brief quizzes.

This device is used to collect equivalent names for numbers. It offers a simple way for children to experience the powerful notion that numbers can be expressed in many different ways.

A name-collection box is an open-top box with a label attached to it. The name on the label identifies the number whose names are collected in the box. The box shown is a "35 box," a name-collection box for the number 35.

Names can introduce sums, differences, products, quotients, the results of combining several operations, words in English or another language, tally marks, arrays, Roman numerals, and so on.

This activity consists of a set of number pairs in which numbers in each pair are related to one another according to the same rule. This relationship can be represented by a "function machine" that is programmed to process numbers according to a rule. A number (input) is put into the machine and is transformed into a second number (output) through the application of the rule. The skills developed are a prerequisite for pre-algebra.

What's My Rule? problems are usually displayed in table form, in which two of the three parts are known. The goal is to find the unknown part.