This unit is an EQuIP Exemplar for adult education (http://achieve.org/equip). Students will connect their prior, real-world knowledge to the concept of order in mathematics. They will go through a discovery process with content that will build a deep, conceptual understanding of the properties of operations to explain why we perform operations in a certain order when we see just the naked numbers.

The goal of this five-day exemplar is to explicitly model the process of searching for and interpreting intra-textual connections. In this lesson sequence, the teacher poses an analytic focusing question and then guides students in gathering and interpreting evidence from the text in order to come to a deeper understanding of the story. Simple word play and art activities give students practice in closely attending to language and word choice, and in visualizing and recording their interpretations. Discussion and a short writing exercise help students to synthesize what they have learned.