These materials were created by Illustrative Mathematics. They were piloted and revised in the 2018–2019 school year.

Units contain between 10 and 25 lesson plans. Each unit has a diagnostic assessment for the beginning of the unit (Check Your Readiness) and an end-of-unit assessment. Longer units also have a mid-unit assessment. In addition to lesson and assessments, modeling prompts are provided to be used throughout the year.

The time estimates in these materials refer to instructional time. Each lesson plan is designed to fit within a class period that is at least 45 minutes long. Some lessons contain optional activities that provide additional scaffolding or practice for teachers to use at their discretion.

There are two ways students can interact with these materials. Students can work solely with printed workbooks or pdfs. Alternatively, if all students have access to an appropriate device, students can look at the task statements on that device and write their responses in a notebook or the print companion for the digital materials. It is recommended that if students are to access the materials this way, they keep the notebook carefully organized so that they can go back to their work later. 

Teachers can access the teacher materials either in print or in a browser. A classroom with a digital projector is recommended.

Many activities are written in a card sort, matching, or info gap format that requires teachers to provide students with a set of cards or slips of paper that have been photocopied and cut up ahead of time. Teachers might stock up on two sizes of resealable plastic bags: sandwich size and gallon size. For a given activity, one set of cards can go in each small bag, and then the small bags for one class can be placed in a large bag. If these are labeled and stored in an organized manner, it can facilitate preparing ahead of time and re-using card sets between classes. Additionally, if possible, it is often helpful to print the slips for different parts of an activity on different color paper. This helps facilitate quickly sorting the cards between classes.