Reimagining Math Intervention

One of the popular hashtags going around the Twitter-sphere right now is #OneWord2020.     The focus of the hashtag is to highlight the one word that defines and describes one’s strategy for the new year.       For me, my #OneWord2020 is Advocacy . I became a math teacher, because I wanted to help my students gain an appreciation and a passion for math similar to mine.  I wanted to help the next generation look at math as a fun problem-solving activity rather than a series of drills and algorithms.  This was my mission.  What I wasn’t expecting was how quickly that mission could change. Poor Student - Richer Teaching During a teacher’s first two years in our school district, a mentor is assigned to the teacher.  Different activities and trainings are planned throughout the year to help the new teachers be successful.  One of the activities I was able to participate in was a book club.  Ther...

One of the courses I took as a part of my Masters program focused on literacy and the bilingual student.  When I looked over the syllabus, I was concerned as many of the assignment required writing strategies to be taught in our actual classrooms.  Two thoughts immediately came to mind.  First, how am I going to teach a writing strategy?  The only writing involved in math is solving a problem.   The second thought was, “Great, I’m going to waste valuable instructional time on writing instead of filling in the gaps my students have in math”.  Throughout this course, I have come to realize how shallow and incorrect my initial thoughts were. Does writing belong in the math classroom? Yes!  Mathematics is not just about answering problems, or writing numbers.  Math is about thinking.  Math is about problem solving.  And using writing in mathematics will help fine tune a student’s thought process and problem solving skills.  Th...

I recently took on a challenge to do an interactive read aloud in one of my math intervention classes.  As a math teacher, I was initially skeptical about doing an interactive read aloud with one of my classes.  I have read books to my students before during class, but have not taken the approach of doing an interactive reading.  The math intervention classes I have are between 20 – 30 minutes long.  My classes usually have about 5 minutes for fact fluency, 10 – 15 minutes of guided instruction, followed by 10 minutes of small groups.  Heading into this task, I was concerned that I would lose valuable time with my students.  In hindsight, looking at reading time as “non-valuable” time was foolish. I decided to try the project out of my Kindergarten class. This is generally a 25 minute class. I felt that I could have the students do their fluency task by practicing writing their numbers.  I specifically had them focus on 0-4 this day, as th...