Units and Big Ideas in Grade 1 of InsightMath Texas
Unit 0 (Doing Mathematics) sets the foundation for this course by establishing routines, process skills, and mindsets essential for success in learning mathematics.
Unit 1 (Adding and Subtracting Within 10) focuses on building strong schemas of addition, subtraction, and how they are connected that are integral to approaching the content of subsequent units. Students explore physical and visual addition and subtraction situations, learning how to represent such situations symbolically, and act out symbolic representations in familiar contexts. As they progress into Unit 2 (Building Approaches to Problem Solving), students explore a variety of ways to represent addition and subtraction situations more abstractly. Unit 2 also focuses on interpreting simple word problems, identifying parts and totals to create models, writing equations, and solving for unknowns.
In Unit 3 (Comparing and Measuring Length), students first venture into the realm of measurement and the concept of continuity. The placement of this unit allows students to spend more time building strong number sense within 10 while developing a schema of length that supports the use of length models such as strip diagrams and bar-type graphs in subsequent units.
Place value concepts in this course are split between Unit 4 (Exploring Place Value Within 120) and Unit 8 (Extending Place Value to 120). Unit 4 focuses on the base-ten structure of the number system, providing students opportunities to see how groupings of ten are integral in the number system and how those groupings relate to the way numerals are written. Later in the year, after students have had time to cement understanding of tens and ones, Unit 8 challenges them to work with numbers more symbolically to compare numbers and to compose and decompose numbers into tens and ones based on the meaning of their digits. Students also come to understand that groupings of 10 continue and explore a hundred as a unit.
After developing a place value understanding of two-digit numbers, students extend their addition and subtraction strategies in Unit 5 (Adding and Subtracting Within 20). While they continue to rely on strategies and models from Units 1 and 2, their new understanding of the importance of 10 opens up the development of additional strategies centered on making a ten and relying on number pairs to 10 as known facts. Unit 6 (Investigating Data) and Unit 7 (Extending Approaches to Problem Solving) provide avenues for synthesizing learning, consolidating skills, and building fluency with addition and subtraction within 20 through relevant contextual opportunities. Unit 7 utilizes data contexts for a wide variety of problem-solving combined with rigorous interpretation of the mathematics in context. The focus of Unit 8 returns to interpretation of word problems, now with emphasis on problem types that are more difficult to interpret. Students draw on now familiar modeling procedures to put mathematics onto the language they encounter in these problems.
In Unit 9 (Building Financial Literacy), students build on the idea of groups developed in the place value units by exploring skip counting by 2s and 5s. They develop an understanding of a single coin as representative of a group and distinguish between the number of coins in a set and the value of those coins. In the last two units of the course, students extend their schema of composing and decomposing to shapes. In Unit 10 (Composing and Decomposing Shapes), students explore ways to build simple and composite shapes from component parts. In Unit 11 (Partitioning Shapes and Time), students apply their understanding of equal groups to generate equal parts. Telling time is viewed through the lens of equal parts of the clock face, giving students the opportunity to synthesize their understanding of many course concepts including equal groups, partitioning shapes, and modeling.