About These Materials
These materials were created by Illustrative Mathematics in collaboration with Open Up Resources. They were piloted and revised in the 2016–2017 school year.
Further revisions were made in 2019. In addition to many small edits made for clarity, consistency, ease of use, and correctness, these revisions include:
- Updated supports for students with disabilities using a revised framework (read more in the Supporting Students with Disabilities section).
- Alt text for all images to enhance accessibility for users with visual impairments.
- Item-by-item guidance for how to use the results of pre-unit diagnostic assessments. Each item on these assessments now includes an indication of which lesson students need the skill or concept for, and guidance on what to do if students struggle or do well on the item. Based on feedback from our community, we also changed the name of these assessments from Pre-unit Diagnostic Assessments to Check Your Readiness.
- New culminating lessons for units that didn’t have one:
- grade 6, unit 6, lesson 19 Tables, Equations, and Graphs, Oh My!
- grade 6, unit 7, lesson 19 Drawing on the Coordinate Plane
- grade 7, unit 6, lesson 23 Applications of Expressions
- grade 8, unit 8, lesson 16 When Is the Same Size Not the Same Size?
- New assessments. Based on feedback from our community, we learned that these units would benefit from the addition of a mid-unit assessment:
- grade 6, unit 6, mid-unit assessment
- grade 7, unit 8, mid-unit assessment
- New info gap activities. Based on feedback from our community, we learned that it would be helpful to strategically place some new info gaps to avoid waiting too long in between the occurrence of info gaps:
- grade 6, unit 4, lesson 12, activity 2 Info Gap: How Many Would It Take?
- grade 6, unit 7, lesson 7, activity 3 Info Gap: Points on the Number Line
- grade 8, unit 4, lesson 15, activity 3 Info Gap: Racing and Play Tickets
- grade 8, unit 7, lesson 14, activity 3 Info Gap: Distances in the Solar System
- Also based on feedback from our community, we made improvements to:
- image quality
- consistency of blackline master formatting
- pagination and work space for students
Each course contains nine units. Each of the first eight are anchored by a few big ideas in grade-level mathematics. Units contain between 11 and 23 lesson plans. Each unit has a diagnostic assessment for the beginning of the unit (Check Your Readiness) and an end-of-unit assessment. Longer units also have a mid-unit assessment. The last unit in each course is structured differently, and contains optional lessons that help students apply and tie together big ideas from the year.
The time estimates in these materials refer to instructional time. Each lesson plan is designed to fit within a class period that is at least 45 minutes long. Some lessons contain optional activities that provide additional scaffolding or practice for teachers to use at their discretion.
There are two ways students can interact with these materials. Students can work solely with printed workbooks or pdfs. Alternatively, if all students have access to an appropriate device, students can look at the task statements on that device and write their responses in a notebook or the print companion for the digital materials. It is recommended that if students are to access the materials this way, they keep the notebook carefully organized so that they can go back to their work later.
Teachers can access the teacher materials either in print or in a browser. A classroom with a digital projector is recommended.
Many activities are written in a card sort, matching, or info gap format that requires teachers to provide students with a set of cards or slips of paper that have been photocopied and cut up ahead of time. Teachers might stock up on two sizes of resealable plastic bags: sandwich size and gallon size. For a given activity, one set of cards can go in each small bag, and then the small bags for one class can be placed in a large bag. If these are labeled and stored in an organized manner, it can facilitate preparing ahead of time and re-using card sets between classes. Additionally, if possible, it is often helpful to print the slips for different parts of an activity on different color paper. This helps facilitate quickly sorting the cards between classes.