ABSTRACT
Building reasoning skills in young children is an essential element of teaching math in the primary grades. Reasoning is one of the 5 elements of being a mathematically proficient student. Kilpatrick, Swafford and Findell note that "with the help of representation-building experiences, children can demonstrate sophisticated reasoning abilities". There are also coin puzzle problems that elicit the same type of reasoning but using coins as a pretext rather than beans. Students need to be able to write the expression and/or equation that matches a problem because it shows that they can reason about the numbers-going from words to numbers. Convince me problems are set up so that students can actually prove their thinking in a logical format. These problems require students to use numbers, words and pictures to explain their thinking. Students should work on matrix problems, Venn diagrams, tables and animal leg problems to improve their reasoning skills.
