DreamBox

I'm excited to let you know about DreamBox Learning, an online math program with educational games that are individualized for each student. It's a fun, effective math learning environment that supports the work your child is doing in the classroom. The DreamBox curriculum develops computational fluency, conceptual understanding, and problem-solving ability.

Adapts to Each Child

DreamBox Learning's adaptive learning looks beyond right or wrong answers, assessing a student's strategy. Simply getting the answer right isn't enough. How quickly did a student answer? Did he need extra hints? Did she improve? Based on this data, the DreamBox technology adapts the lesson, difficulty, the number and type of hints given, pacing, sequence, and much more. Placement lessons throughout the adventures assess students' knowledge, so they can skip what they know and focus on what they're ready to learn.

Really Fun!

Students explore an intermediate learning environment that builds persistence, confidence, and achievement. As students learn, they can earn badges, coins to personalize their music and wallpaper, and they can even unlock new math minigames.

Helpful Tips

Encourage your child to complete the lessons with the gold coins and stars, even if they find them difficult, rather than abandoning them in the middle. Also encourage students to "fill up the thermometer" for each lesson.

The recommended best practice for success with this program is 60 to 90 minutes per week (total time including home and school), with approximately 20 minutes spent in one sitting.

How to Get Started

Go to our school's DreamBox website:

• https://play.dreambox.com/login/4rts/7w26

• Your child will enter his/her username and password (with the asterisk).

• Use Clever Log-In

Using the iPad or Tablet: School Code is 4rts/spragues

How to Help

Due to DreamBox's adaptive technology, it is most desirable for students to work on the program independently. If a parent or sibling provides too much overt assistance, answers for your child, or someone else plays on their account, it is likely that the system will temporarily attribute levels of understanding or misunderstanding that do not accurately reflect that of your child.

Try some of these approaches if your child asks for help:

~Encourage your child to make his or her best guess. Remind them it's OK to make some mistakes. The program learns a lot from the types of mistakes they make and will respond accordingly.

~Answer a question with a question. "What do you think?"

~Click the "Help" button.

~Click the "Help" button again. The second help is more explicit than the first help.

~Ask your child to explain the game to you. Sometimes talking it through like this will give them the answer.