Real-world investigations can move students in the middle grades from their earlier, informal understanding of measurement to the abstract, sophisticated understanding they will need in high school. This book provides hands-on activities that build important strategies and concepts. Students learn about accuracy and estimation and they develop formulas for the perimeter, area and volume of two-and three-dimensional figures. In exploring proportionality, scaling and similarity, they build a scale model of a room and make a ""pi ruler"" to help gauge the age of a tree. As they progress from fundamental measures to derived measures, they investigate such rates as speed and density. The supplemental CD-ROM features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students and additional readings for teachers.

An understanding of data analysis is essential to the mathematics education of informed citizens. This book illustrates the general notion of statistics as a process while prompting discussions of increasingly complex mathematical issues. It extends and deepens students' knowledge of data analysis, introduces the comparison of data sets with equal and unequal numbers of elements and presents the analysis of data involving two variables. Using technology with the book's activities can assist students in becoming proficient at ""interrogating"" data. The supplemental CD-ROM features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students and additional readings for teachers.

This book examines the study of geometry in the middle grades as a pivotal point in the mathematical learning of students and emphasises the geometric thinking that can develop in grades 6-8 as a result of hands-on exploration. An essay on the accompanying CD-ROM describes the van Hiele framework and how it can help improve teaching strategies and assessment. The supplemental CD-ROM also features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students and additional readings for teachers.

This book helps students develop their probabilistic thinking by introducing them to the notion of sample space and the use of tree diagrams and geometric regions to represent sample spaces. Many activities present probability in the context of the fairness of games, a topic of great interest to middle-grades students. Notions of population samples, prediction over the long term and the law of large numbers are reinforced through games and engaging problems. The supplemental CD-ROM features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students and additional readings for teachers.