“If you are a parent of a child in the K-12 system, there is today just one thing you should ensure your offspring has mastered in the math class by the time they graduate: number sense.” Dr. Keith Devlin, mathematician at Stanford University Number sense is the single best indicator of students’ success in math. It is critical in the Common Core State Standards in math, and is the reason curriculum companies have built
My first graders came to me with a lot of background knowledge on shapes and their properties. I was impressed with the amount of information they retained from kindergarten and from other learning experiences. Because we didn’t need to spend a ton of time on 2-D shapes it was the perfect opportunity to integrate art into our unit to help students continue to develop their understanding of shape properties and to demonstrate content mastery. Working at an
Fact fluency routines are often filled with worksheets and timed activities. They do have their place in the classroom, but they’re not very engaging. While I’ve definitely learned that fact fluency does not mean 1 second recall and strict timing systems, I also firmly believe that having a strong memorization of facts helps students focus their mental effort and energy on the larger math skills at hand. It’s important to build fact fluency in students.
Classroom calendars used to be commonplace in nearly every first grade classroom, and even a lot of second grade classrooms. As the push for standards accountability has grown, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer teachers implementing calendar in their classrooms because the “standards” don’t “dictate” it. Or, because they just are feeling the time crunch and with the struggle to fit everything in, calendar has been cut. My classroom calendar is the single biggest tool for
For my first several years of teaching, I struggled with teaching math. I tried teaching what I thought was Guided Math to my small groups. I hated it and didn’t feel like I had enough time to teach my students. I tried teaching whole group, but too many students struggled to stay engaged and I struggled to see the work they were doing to provide feedback and support. For a year and a half I
