Math Review

Teacher confession time...I am SO not a math brain.

Math is what knocked me off of academic honors in high school.

Dang you, trigonometry.

I think part of that is that I was a TERRIBLE problem solver until I was in my early twenties.

If I reached an obstacle I expected someone to tell me how to figure it out.

I even had to (problems with transferring a few times, mind you) take 5 semesters of math in college.

I went to school for 6 years, so that's actually not THAT bad.

Thank my lucky stars that one of the members of my team has a math brain.

She has really taken math under her wing this year and become our resident expert.

Right now, we are finishing up a rotation where she teaches my nuggets math three days a week.

One of our "master teachers" (we are a TAP school) suggested that we do a math review each day.

His former school did this in order to incorporate Common Core standards (and those awesomely terrific standardized tests that we willingly and gladly do each year) into our every day routine.

Here is an example of what we are doing this week.

The nuggets are working on fact families, adding multiple two digit numbers, quantity discrimination (which one is bigger), and adding coins.

We have worked on many other topics already this year.

We do this daily.

I hand these out facedown.

My nuggets get 5 minutes to work on the problems. 

When the timer goes off my nuggets put their "desk offices" down and we go over it together.

They are required to fix what they have gotten wrong.

I walk around the room while they are working to make sure that they are actually trying to do the problems and not just waiting for the answers.

This entire process takes around 10 - 12 minutes total.

Each Friday my nuggets take a quiz with two questions for each topic on it.

I grade those and if 80% of my class passes a section it gets replaced with something else.

I have seen major growth in my nuggets.

I had some who were still struggling to add 2-digit numbers but can now since they have had daily practice.

I'm a fan.

We have been doing this school-wide and I am extremely excited to see our math ISTEP scores!

If our Acuity (a pre-ISTEP measurement tool) scores are accurate we will have an excellent passing rate!

Woot woot!

Laters,

Mrs. B