Abstract
We have characterized what we call relational thinking to include looking at expressions and equations in their entirety rather than as procedures to be carried out step by step. For the last 8 years, we have been studying how to provide opportunities for students to engage in relational thinking in elementary classrooms and how to use relational thinking to learn arithmetic. In this article, we present interviews with two third-grade students from classrooms that foster the use of relational thinking. In both cases, we focus on the distributive property. The first example illustrates how a teacher scaffolds a sequence of number sentences to help a student begin to relate multiplication number facts using the distributive property. The second example shows another student who is already using the distributive property and the extent of his knowledge.
