Progression – Mathmasteryschools.com also helps me id any gaps and engages my students with their learning in an interesting, visual and kinetic way! Is there an on-line program you use?
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We are heading down the path of progression where student lulls, growth and declines in progression are watched regularly. In a multi-age 5/6 class, that is a lot of differentiation, assessment across year benchmarks and really keeping afoot on my planning. I need to ensure I cover all the standards for both years in the same amount of time a teacher would cover one set of benchmarks for a single year class.
http://www.mathmasteryschools.com/ helps. Maybe there are different on-line programs out there, but I have been using this e-teaching tool for almost 10 years…and I love it more each time. The key to math mastery is two fold.
First, the assessments are clear and else to understand for my use. Students take pretests, practice problems; mid-course tests…all that can be monitored quickly, on-line to help me ‘see’ where students are in different math areas. Plus, they seem to enjoy sending me updates from home, at crazy hours to show off their quality work. So far my latest sent report from a student was 10.30pm... and yes, that is 5/6 grade.
However, the true wonderfulness of MathMasterySchools is that the program does not appear in grade levels – just lessons within a course. So even though the learning concepts range from 1 through 8th grade (I believe), students just know they are taking lesson 1 in addition or lesson 10, and so forth. I feel this allows students to safely and privately work through any gaps in learning and look at math as more of sequential steps, rather than grade level boxes. It is differentiation at its best…hitting the developmental next steps without making a child feel they are ‘failing’ when they are learning. (Maybe just not at the same pace.)
I just received my Florida lead money. Thank you whoever developed this reimbursement program for monies spent towards my classroom. My lead money and the cost of mathmasteryschools.com just about synced up. I would recommend asking parents to donate a few dollars rather than using lead monies. However, in my class, I may not of of gotten much to finance it. So better to get it paid and started.
How do I set it up? First, all the usernames and passwords I try to sync up between all the various on-line programs to make it easy for the student and parent. I have a chart recording lessons completed (not scores on practice problems). Once they have watched the video tutorial and completed the practice problems, I put up a sticker for the effort. I have some students who need a more focused, visual learning environment. So while I am working in small groups, I have them on Mathmastery to work on specific courses and stretch their learning.
I am so tired. It is a Friday night…after a long week. I did get my spelling and vocabulary lists home with the students and we had a really great day. I am sitting here with my cup of tea ready to fall asleep. Hope my spelling and grammar isn't too bad.
Enjoy!
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