ABSTRACT
I created the Snack Food Unit partly to satisfy one of the missions of my school, which is the generation of new teaching materials and strategies to help colleagues implement Standards-based teaching in K-12 classrooms. The unit is for middle grades students and centers around solving a problem comparing our own eating habits of snack food with other countries. I try to find ways to teach students to develop their own thoughts and ideas because the mathematics classroom is a room full of people, not machines. And people have emotions, and people learn differently, and they feel differently on different days, and most important—they THINK. And they LOVE to think. They love to feel important. This kind of teaching gives students a chance to think and to feel important.
