Exploring Mathematics Grade 6

I am a sixth grade teacher, and I use the textbook with my students.For every chapter, most concepts are taught with a real-life application, and, more often than not, a way to use hands-on manipulatives for teaching concepts. For example, in the section on area of triangles, students are instructed to cut out triangles drawn on graph paper to find out that a triangle is simply one half of a rectangle; hence, area of a triangle equals one half of the base times the height. Nothing in this book is taught without students understanding the "whys" for how things work.Also, every chapter focuses heavily on mental math so that students can begin the verification process even before working out an algorithm.