Here is a repost from the blog craftymathed. We thought this might be of practical help for some of you struggling with the transition to Common Core.
Using the common core to my advantage
This year I switched to using the common core standards themselves, and cross-referencing them to the standards of the state (which technically adopted them, but they added some stuff and reorganized and whatever). One of the things I did this year was to block things off in the sections that CCSS does: “Number and quantity,” “Algebra,” “Functions,” etc.
To introduce each topic, CCSS has a few paragraphs about what that topic entails. So I read them. And I really liked the way they said everything, as a mathematician. Not so much as a teacher, because I knew that my students would get overwhelmed by this jargon they didn’t understand. But, I love it because it created a teachable opportunity. This summer I went through those paragraphs and highlighted the stuff my students would actually know but wouldn’t realize it. I created some pre-reading questions to jog their memories (that’s right, those education classes did come in handy), and then some post-reading questions that weren’t necessarily spelled out in the text.
Read the complete article at http://craftymathed.blogspot.com/2013/09/using-common-core-to-my-advantage.html