337 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Suh et al. (eds.), Exploring Mathematical Modeling with Young Learners, Early Mathematics Learning and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63900-6_14 Chapter 14 Mathematical Modeling with Young Learners: A Commentary Elham Kazemi These four chapters paint a vision of the possibilities and challenges we face in opening up rich modeling activities in the primary grades. Across them we see how young children and their teachers engage with modeling tasks. As I read across these chapters, I was interested in the nature of tasks that students engaged in, what counted as good modeling activities for elementary-aged students, what students did inside the situations they were modeling, how teachers responded, and fnally what teacher educators might need to consider as they support teachers to take up modeling. I have organized my response in this commentary around a set of questions: 1. Why engage in modeling activities with young children? 2. What kinds of modeling tasks were used in these classrooms? 3. What were the consequences for students of engaging in these tasks? 4. What can we learn from these studies about supporting teachers? 14.1 Why Modeling? Mathematics educators continue to search for ways to make the learning of mathe- matics in school contexts to be about meaning-making and intellectually rewarding problem-solving work. We posit that school mathematics should be empowering and identity-affrming work and that doing mathematics should contribute to E. Kazemi (*) College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA e-mail: ekazemi@uw.edu