"We encourage teachers [parents] to see the power of student discourse to foster engagement, models to support visualization, contexts to connect the mathematics to the real world of children, and alternative strategies to effectively differentiate."

" A rich and thorough development of number relationships is a critical foundation for mastering basic facts. Without number relationships, facts must be rotely memorized. With number understanding, facts for addition and subtraction are relatively simple extensions."

"One of the reasons that it is important for students to commit facts to memory is to ease the load on the brain when performing more complex calculations. If a student has to struggle over each piece of a more calculated computation, it will be difficult to get through"