These materials were created by Illustrative Mathematics in collaboration with Open Up Resources. They were piloted and revised in the 2016–2017 school year.

Further revisions were made in 2019. In addition to many small edits made for clarity, consistency, ease of use, and correctness, these revisions include:

• Many more lesson-level supports for English Language Learners.
• Enhancements to the student glossary, including language modifications for accessibility and many more illustrations and diagrams.
• Overview of the progression of academic language provided for each instructional unit.
• Updated lesson learning goals that highlight the language demands of the lesson.
• Redesigned lesson-level supports for students with disabilities. These include an updated framework based on principles of Universal Design for Learning, along with activity-specific instructional moves that provide teachers with actionable ways to support access to the curriculum.
• Alt text for all images to enhance accessibility for users with visual impairments.
• Item-by-item guidance for how to use the results of pre-unit diagnostic assessments. Each item on these assessments now includes an indication of which lesson students need the skill or concept for, and guidance on what to do if students struggle or do well on the item. Based on feedback from our community, we also changed the name of these assessments from Pre-unit Diagnostic Assessments to Check Your Readiness.
• New culminating lessons for units that didn’t have one:
  • grade 6, unit 6, lesson 19 Tables, Equations, and Graphs, Oh My!
  • grade 6, unit 7, lesson 19 Drawing on the Coordinate Plane
  • grade 7, unit 6, lesson 23 Applications of Expressions
  • grade 8, unit 8, lesson 16 When Is the Same Size Not the Same Size?
• New assessments. Based on feedback from our community, we learned that these units would benefit from the addition of a mid-unit assessment:
  • grade 6, unit 6, mid-unit assessment
  • grade 7, unit 8, mid-unit assessment 
• New info gap activities strategically placed to give students more frequent opportunities to practice this math language routine without waiting too long in between:
  • grade 6, unit 4, lesson 12, activity 2 Info Gap: How Many Would It Take?
  • grade 6, unit 7, lesson 7, activity 3 Info Gap: Points on the Number Line
  • grade 8, unit 4, lesson 15, activity 3 Info Gap: Racing and Play Tickets
  • grade 8, unit 7, lesson 14, activity 3 Info Gap: Distances in the Solar System
• Also based on feedback from our community, we made improvements to:
  • image quality
  • consistency of blackline master formatting
  • pagination and work space for students

A Spanish translation of the student materials for IM 6–8 is available. The text of the IM 6-8 Math student materials was translated by a team that consisted of math teachers who are native speakers of Spanish and also fluent in English. Every member of the team has a degree in mathematics education or a related field, as well as experience teaching math in a formal setting. The team’s strategy was to collaboratively determine wording that would be best understood by the most people from the most countries, instead of using any one regional dialect. Going forward, the English and Spanish materials will be maintained simultaneously. Errors found in either language will be corrected in both versions. Any time the content of the English version is updated, updates to the Spanish version will follow.

Each course contains nine units. Each of the first eight are anchored by a few big ideas in grade-level mathematics. Units contain between 11 and 23 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. The last unit in each course is structured differently, and contains optional lessons that help students apply and tie together big ideas from 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.