As a parent, you’re most likely to encounter the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (Common Core Standards for short) in the homework that your child brings home. The Common Core Standards are a set of statements about what students should know and be able to do at each grade level from kindergarten through high school.

In Common Core math, third graders use a number line to see how fractions relate to each other. A number line is useful for showing the relative location of fractions, as well as their distance from each other. You may remember a number line running across the front wall of an elementary classroom when you were in school, with a point for zero, a point to the right of that marked 1, then 2 and so on, with an arrow on the end to suggest that the line and the numbers continue forever.

A lot of misinformation is available about the Common Core Standards. These standards guide the math your child learns in school each year. In order to advocate for and to support your child, you need to be well informed. Here are some important facts that counter some of the common myths about the Common Core Standards.

One important change in the Common Core Math Standards is that students are expected to work through multi-digit computations by thinking about number relationships before they’re expected to follow standard algorithms. For parents who never had to think about their computations in school, this can make homework time a bit daunting.

Place value is an important concept to know for Common Core math. The fact that it took thousands of years for humans to develop a place value number system is an important sign that place value is difficult for people to learn. The usual way of writing numbers is a place value number system. In other words, a limited set of symbols (called digits) builds numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, and so on up to 9) and you can write all numbers using these symbols.

States, districts, schools, and teachers have invested a lot of time, money, and effort implementing the Common Core Math Standards — to say nothing of parents. Before the Common Core, each state wrote its own standards for math. Now, nearly all states have agreed on the mathematics students will study in school.

You will want to make sure that your child is familiar with comparing logarithms for Common Core math. In addition to comparing numbers with ratio and unit rate, you can actually compare numbers a third way — with logarithms. A logarithm is basically an exponent. In the equation 10x = 100, writing log10(100) is how you solve for x; log is short for logarithm (in this case, x = 2).

Homework is a hot topic in the transition to Common Core Standards. Homework assignments that ask students to think in new ways can be intimidating to parents. When something comes home that looks unfamiliar to you, don’t panic. Homework is just a way of giving students additional time to think about the things that they’re learning — what teachers call time on task.

An important way to think about functions for Common Core math is as relationships between variables. If you think of a function as a relationship, you can keep an eye out for useful features. These features include whether (and where) a function is increasing or decreasing, whether a function is linear or not, and so on.