If you’ve been following along with our Word Problem Bootcamp, we’ve already looked at two big challenges. In Week 1, we talked about comprehension, when students don’t truly understand what’s happening in the story. In Week 2, we talked about connection, when students understand the story but can’t yet connect
We don’t have to be sitting in a math classroom to improve our students’ number sense and math skills! There are tons of board games that help improve math skills. These games can give your students math skills a big BOOST while your kids don’t even realize they are learning.
Some students can read a word problem, understand every part of the story, and even tell you what’s happening in their own words but when it’s time to find the math, they’re completely stuck. They aren’t confused by the words; they’re confused by how those words connect to operations. This
You’ve seen it a hundred times. You hand your students a word problem that should be totally within reach. They read it. They stare. They pluck out numbers and start adding them together. They aren’t sure what they are doing but they sure are “doing something”! It’s not that they
Halloween week has a special kind of energy in the classroom. You can feel the excitement building and sometimes it feels like keeping everyone focused is half the battle! I pulled together my favorite Halloween math activities, perfect for this high energy week, all in one place. Each one brings
One of the most common questions about second grade math is why students are asked to learn so many different addition strategies. At first glance, it can feel random and overwhelming but there is actually a very intentional progression happening.
You can certainly try to attack “fact fluency” as one giant skill, but it will not be effective. There are over 100 individual addition facts, 100 subtraction facts, 100 multiplication facts, and 100 division facts. Expecting students to master 400 isolated facts with immediate recall between first and third grade
Math interventionists walk a fine line every day. On one hand, being responsive to the gaps right in front of you. On the other hand, thinking about where you want your students to be months from now and how today’s choices either move them closer or leave them stuck. Truly,
One of the biggest challenges math intervention teachers face is figuring out how to bridge the gap between intervention work and Tier 1 instruction. On the one hand, students identified for math intervention often have significant gaps in foundational skills. That raises the first challenge: should intervention time focus on
Should Math Intervention Follow Tier 1 or Fill Learning Gaps? Many intervention teachers feel pressure to mirror Tier 1 instruction in their small group space. If students are struggling in Tier 1, it seems natural to pull those same lessons into intervention so students can keep up in the classroom.