This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to: Perform arithmetic operations, including those involving whole-number exponents, recognizing and applying the conventional order of operations; Write and evaluate numerical expressions from diagrammatic representations and be able to identify equivalent expressions; apply the distributive and commutative properties appropriately; and use the method for finding areas of compound rectangles.

Students will begin to improve their computational fluency with combinations of 10, 15, and/or 20. They will develop strategies for combining numbers as they solve problems and play games. They will be able to apply their knowledge of these basic facts to word problems and more complicated computational problems. They will begin to use the commutative property and realize that in an addition problem the order of the numbers does not matter.

This comprehensive lesson plan taps on students' conceptual understanding of the area model, order of operations, and whole-number exponents to explore and solve a card-matching task. Students will need to match a set of compound rectangles to numerical expression that will give the area for the figure. Students will need to utilize the distributive and commutative properties to solve the task. Aside from the expressions and equations standard, this resource can be used as a geometry/measurement task as well. This lesson plan contemplates individual and group activities producing student engagement.

Big Ideas: Rounding is an appropriate strategy for solving problems and estimating. Numbers can be decomposed and recomposed to add and subtract.
This lesson builds on student knowledge of place value of whole numbers less than or equal to 1000. This task uses a range of weights for endangered animals for students to apply rounding principles to make totals of 1000 and 2000 using addition and subtraction strategies. This builds conceptual understanding of rounding to build upon for practical use for problem solving using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Vocabulary: base-ten, expanded form, place value, accurate, complements, commutative property, partial sums

This resource is a link to an interactive game-based formative assessment on writing expressions. Students are able to practice taking written expressions and turning them into algebraic expressions in a game-based fashion.