2012 - 2013 1st 9 Weeks Meeting

The Math Committee met this week for our first meeting of the new school year.  Those in attendance discussed the ways they are using the new Kim Sutton math activities and curriculum and shared ideas with others as to how they can easily incorporate them into their math lessons.  The 2nd grade teacher has been using the "Pattern Sticks" as a tool for practicing skip counting and setting up a strong foundation for multiplication and division in later grade levels.  It was determined that the same tool should be used across all grade levels to provide consistency and increase student math fact fluency. 

We also discussed online resources that are used in various grade levels so that each of the other grade levels could use them (if the content is grade level appropriate.)

The final item on our list was to discuss Math Journals.  We found out that only some grade levels are using them and not even all the teachers in that grade level maintain Math Journals for all students.  We brainstormed ideas of how they could be used in each grade level and determined that by next school year, we want to have Math Journals as a school-wide initiative to increase student understanding of math vocabulary, provide additional opportunity to master strategies needed to solve word problems and other math objectives.  

During our next meeting we will compare the 1st CBA scores seen school wide to the scores on other campuses and to our scores from last year.  New academic gaps will be identified based on the student's performance on the test and a plan will be developed for addressing those gaps in each grade level.