The most important thing to understand about a math diagnostic assessment is its purpose: to give you the information you need to make good instructional decisions. A typical math intervention screener might give you a long list of skills a student cannot do. It may confirm what you already knew:
Concrete materials help students understand math in a tangible way. Imagine I met someone who had never had an apple before. If I told them, “I had an apple for lunch,” they might be able to deduce that an apple is food because I ate it for lunch, but that
As the year winds down, it’s a perfect time to set yourself up for success in the year ahead. I have prepared a list of reflection questions to help you think about which practices you want to maintain in the upcoming year and where you might have room for more
This is a question I get often, especially from 4th and 5th-grade teachers: “How do I support Tier 1 in math intervention? The kids are so far behind that what they are doing in the classroom doesn’t make any sense to them.” It’s a fair question, and it usually comes
Last week we talked about how to develop a plan for math intervention. Before that, I shared a broader look at how data fits into math intervention. There are a few different types of data we’re collecting, and each one serves a different purpose. We have screening data that helps
Last week we talked about how to determine where the breakdown is happening in your students’ math work. We have a skill we want to target, and now the work shifts to figuring out what to actually do in order to teach that skill. The first thing I’m thinking about
When a student is struggling, it’s really easy to feel like they need everything. Like we need to go all the way back, reteach it all, give more practice, just keep throwing things at the deficit until something sticks. When I notice a student struggling, I’m not immediately thinking about
Over the past several weeks we have explored different families of visual models and how they develop across grade levels. We have looked at models of the count sequence, part–whole models, discrete models, and area models. Each of these representations supports understanding math in a different way. The question that
In the early grades, students often experience multiplication through equal groups or arrays. They might build groups with counters, draw rows of dots, or skip count their way through a problem. These experiences help students understand what multiplication represents and means. As the numbers grow larger and the calculations become
Over the past few weeks, we have been exploring different types of visual models and how they support student thinking across grade levels. After talking about the importance of visual models overall, we looked at models of the count sequence such as number paths and number lines. Then we looked