The B.E.S.T. Minute

A quick welcome from Dr. Steven Shadel, Senior National Math Content Specialist, Great Minds.

See how the same visual model carries a student from first-grade part-whole thinking to fifth-grade fractions and beyond, so teachers spend less time introducing new tools and more time teaching the math itself.

Watch the Happy Counting warm-up in action and see how a routine that takes two to three minutes builds number sense, flags where students hesitate on benchmark numbers, and scales from whole numbers up through fractions and decimals.

Watch a single true/sometimes/never math statement turn student hesitation into genuine curiosity, and see why that pause before an answer is exactly where real reasoning starts.

See the sentence frames, margin notes, and sample solutions already written into the curriculum, giving teachers real-time guidance for supporting every student's math language and reasoning without extra prep time.