Relational Thinking

In these problems, the goal is for students to reason and decide whether a statement is true or false, or to fill in the blanks or a problem without computing each side.

Relational Thinking exercises help students generalize which strategies work for each operation as they use properties of operations and numerical relationships to work with equations. Like in many other routines, the power comes from conversation that follows, after students have been given time to consider and make sense of the relationships they can use. You can use one or two of these problems when you have short bits of time.