Math

We strongly believe that students need to a great amount of hands-on practice before they begin to represent mathematical concepts in a more abstract form (drawings followed by formulas). We also believe that students need to understand how the concepts that are being taught relate to the “real world” and how they are relevant to them.

We try to plan activities that can be individualized and practiced in an authentic manner. As such, students will rarely have any incomplete work that becomes homework. For those students who do not fully utilize their practice time at school, they they may be asked to complete it as homework. Math games will sometimes make an appearance as homework. These games have been introduced in-class and students will have had an opportunity to play them with their classmates.

Since a lot of the Math that is done in class is hands-on or interactive, there are certain concepts that you may not see written down. For example, if we were working on bar graphs, we may use glyphs (pictorial forms of data collection, each student’s picture will be different from their classmates’) to make a life-sized bar graph on the floor and then practice interpreting the results from there. Each day we would find another element of the glyph to decipher thereby practicing interpreting data through bar graphs.

Drills and mental math facts are slowly introduced. Students will have time to practice in short bursts each day. Drills do have an important role in Math, however, understanding of concepts continues to be a priority.