College Math for Elementary Education – Patterns through Exploration and Play, with Algebra Extensions
Authors: Kathleen Offenholley and Fatima Prioleau
This textbook has been designed for students and faculty in the City of New York University System as part of the free Open Education Resource (OER) Project but may be used by students and faculty anywhere. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
To the student
This textbook is designed for you to read in many ways:
- You can read the text online and do the interactive exercises as you read.
- You can watch the videos within each section, and answer the questions embedded within the videos.
- You can print or make pdfs of each section and read those offline.
It is important to do the interactive exercises and to try to answer the questions as you go. Research has shown that answering questions helps you remember, to retain the information better. Why? Because you are making the information yours as you work through each question.
Algebra extensions
The algebra extensions will help you see how the foundations of what you will be teaching children tie in to algebra. These sections can help you review algebra if it has been a long time since you have taken it, or learn the algebra you may not have gotten or understood in high school. Depending on what course you are taking, the algebra extensions may be a required or optional part of the course.
To the instructor
This textbook is designed to teach the typical topics in a Liberal Arts mathematics course, but from the perspective of how these topics connect to the mathematics that children learn in elementary school. In addition to liberal arts mathematics, there are algebra extensions which you may require the students to do, or which may be helpful as optional sections for students who need the review.
Homework
At the end of each section, a PDF is given of homework exercises and a separate PDF of answers to some of the problems. Alternatively, instructors can choose to assign homework through helpyourmath.com, an open source homework platform, where questions have been created to match each section of the text. The advantage to using the online system is that most questions are auto-graded; students can see whether they are correct or not and can try a different version of the problem if they are not. Since the questions in the homework platform are not identical to the ones in pdf form, it is best if instructors choose which modality they wish to use at the start of the semester, and inform their students. For more about how to access and to use this system as an instructor, see helpyourmath.com.