Math: 30 minutes total per day

Over the course of a week, lessons should provide students an opportunity to participate virtually in a balance of learning activities that build and require conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application.

Draft Middle School Math Curriculum

Continue to use the current MS draft curriculum pacing guides and start where you left off, with the understanding that review will be necessary and online learning will not look like face to face classroom instruction (see guidelines and supports below).

6/7/8 Compacted Math Pacing Guide

6th Grade Math Pacing Guide

7th Grade Math Pacing Guide

8th Grade Math Pacing Guide

Students should spend the large majority of their time on the major work of the grade. The Standards call for a greater focus in mathematics. Rather than racing to cover topics in a mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum, the Standards require us to significantly narrow and deepen the way time and energy is spent in the math classroom. We focus deeply on the major work of each grade so that students can gain strong foundations: solid conceptual understanding, a high degree of procedural skill and fluency, and the ability to apply the math they know to solve problems inside and outside the math classroom. Grade level standards

An ABSOLUTE MUST SEE

The OU guide: guidance for activity selection shares which unit activities should be prioritized (indicated with an *). This does not mean, “If kids only do these activities, everything is fine.” What it does mean is, “Given that you need to skip some stuff, this is a good activity to not skip.” Selected activities represent crucial grade-level understandings or encapsulate several important ideas. It also shares which activities better lend themselves to synchronous vs. asynchronous learning, by indicating whether they: benefit from discussion (needs an opportunity for discussion to be of benefit), could be done independently, or are a worked example.

Benefits from discussion: indicates that the activity really needs some opportunity for discussion for it to make sense to spend time on. For example, the daily warm-ups were written to be low-stakes invitations into the math topic for the day. Students could call a friend or talk with a family member to get the benefit of explaining their thinking and hearing how others would approach the problem. Or, an online tool (for example, padlet) could be used to capture students’ thinking. If synchronous online instruction is used, students could be assigned to attempt the task before the online meeting with perhaps a short reading or video as a launch, and then be assigned to breakout groups during the meeting to share their work, followed by whole-group synthesis with the teacher. Here is a sample lesson plan that involves mostly asynchronous work along with a synchronous meeting that could take around 15 minutes.

Worked example: indicates activities where students could work relatively independently if a worked example were provided for students to analyze, either on paper or video, to support sense-making. Material from the activity launch, synthesis, anticipated misconceptions, or solution could be turned into a worked example for students to analyze after they work on the task statement. This may include both correct or incorrect solutions, to mimic what students would experience in class, as long as incorrect solutions are clearly marked. For example, once students have had a chance to think about 6.6.7.2 Representing a Percentage Problem with an Equation and give it a try, they could read or watch a worked example showing a way to write and solve an equation like the ones in the activity. You could direct students to the worked example already presented in the student lesson summary without needing to create any additional artifacts.

Could be done independently: indicates activities where there is a built-in mechanism to support more independent work on a task, such as row games, matching, scaffolded tables, or other guided instructions. These activities often support students in building procedural fluency. For example, in 6.6.4.2 Row Game: Solving Equations Practice, the row game structure has some checking built in, since the two equations in each row have the same solution.

Students should always have a chance to try any activity themselves before being shown what to do or how to think. This can be done synchronously and videotaped following the district guidelines for students unable to attend a live virtual session. Asynchronously, it is recommended that students complete a task/activity with another classmate, via google docs, etc. and submit their work to the teacher prior to a virtual learning session. The teacher would then collect, sequence, and display student work back to the class. The MLRs and instructional routines are still an essential part of learning and are access strategies for students, along with our BUCKS annotation system and manipulatives. For students applying conceptual and procedural understanding remotely and/or independently, especially with story problems, these cannot be abandoned.

Sample Approach Using Google Classroom

Use the Assistments platform to choose specific tasks and practice problems from OU units to import into Google Classroom. Add the Google Slides available in the Community Created Resources section of each lesson and record videos of yourself going through the slides. Use Google Docs for students to pose and respond to each other’s questions.

There are a myriad of resources below for your support, so you should have to do minimal work to create lessons.

See a sample lesson outline below.

1. Welcome

2. Identify the essential skills and must do lessons for your course using the guidance for activity selection. Then, as you instructionally plan for these items, establish what can be done synchronously and/or asynchronously.

3. Choose specific tasks and problems to import into Google Classroom. The goal is for students to get these ahead of time. They could do them solo, or in the best case scenario would do it via a shared google doc or over the phone, etc. with another classmate.

4. Teacher collect/display. Following the 5 practices of productive discourse, the teacher would select and sequence student work samples to show to the class or model. You could make your own as well. The teacher would then ask discourse questions or other high level discussion questions, including those potentially found in Open Up. For instance, examples could include: do we agree or disagree? Why or why not? These should be submitted to the teacher PRIOR to a synchronous learning session or online video instruction. These could be discussed during office hours or homework support and discussion times synchronously but cannot be videotaped. You would want to collect and display and record these and share with students asynchronously.

5. Mini lesson: Add Google Slides of the lesson and record videos of yourself going through the slides. There are resources below that can support you finding standards aligned video modeling, such as Mr. Morgan's Math Help and Kahn, to name a few. This is the direct instructional component of the lesson and should include modeling through gradual release, clarification of misconceptions, etc. This can easily transition to synchronous types of environments for homework support or discussion times, but you will need to follow the district guidelines for synchronous learning.

6. Lesson synthesis

During any of these steps, you can also use Google Docs for students to pose and respond to each other’s questions during and/or outside the course of this time. The virtual platforms allow for some of this as well, synchronously.

Manipulatives

Manipulatives are an important part of the math learning experience. There are online manipulative tools available, and many are recommended by Open Up. We need to be mindful of access/equity for students. Not all students will have access to school-like manipulatives, so what can we use as alternatives (for example, household items such as macaroni noodles).

Desmos - An interactive platform where students can work on tasks, receive feedback, and collaborate. This page links to helpful information for using the tools during school closures. This post describes how to create self-checking tasks.

Geogebra

Didax

Helpful Resources

Google Classroom - A free web service developed for schools to share assignments with students. This video shows how it works, and in this blog post, teacher Morgan Stipe explains how she sets up her Google Classroom with OUR

Assistments - A free platform that has all of the OUR student tasks, practice problems, and cool downs already loaded. Choose what to assign through Google Classroom. Google Classroom. This video shows how it works. For access to the assessments, reach out to contact@assistments.org.

Open Up

• • Community created resources: The OUR folks are gathering resources here

  • For OUR-specific videos, Khan aligned links, worksheets, etc. : Mr. Morgan’s Math Help

  • For videos & practice problems aligned to the standards taught within each OUR lesson: Khan Academy’s Illustrative Mathematics 6-8 Math

  • Facebook options 6–8 Math Community Grade 6 Math Community Grade 7 Math Community Grade 8 Math Community

  • OU Twitter

  • OU LinkedIn

  • OU Pinterest

Illustrative Mathematics

• • IM curriculum resources, such as digital versions of student guides, etc. downloadable as PDFs.

  • IM K–12 tasks and IM 6–8 Math resources and materials

  • Resources shared by users of IM 6–8 Math and IM 9–12 Math. IM has not reviewed these resources for quality. It contains items such as pre-made digital assessments, etc. and is organized by units here. It is continually updated regularly.

  • Quick downloads of IM 6–8 Math certified curriculum materials (the last three units in each course are available now)

  • Organized community-created resources such as videos, worked examples, online versions of card sorts, interactive applets, and review packets.

  • IM Talking Math 6–8 weekly open-ended, engaging prompts (3-5 questions each) to invite math conversations. They are structured to provide an entry point for all students and additional challenge for those who need it.

  • weekly questions for 6–8

Kendall Hunt: Load IM lessons straight into google classroom

Resources for Weekly Re-engagement

By IM 6–8 Math Team

This week, IM is launching a new resource to support students and teachers with distance learning. Each week we will publish an open-ended prompt or image that invites math conversation, and a series of 3–5 questions. The questions are designed so that all 6–8 students have an entry point for the first question, and all students will find something both familiar and challenging in each set.

Kendall Hunt offers a way to easily load IM 6–8 Math into Google Classroom (requires free teacher login).

LearnZillion provides free access (during this time) to 3-10 minute core-aligned math videos, lessons, and demonstrations. They are searchable by standard and align with the Illustrative Math curriculum.

• • LearnZillion is offering all IM Certified units and lessons for free digitally on learnzillion.com

Illuminate Education

• • Scaffolded Math Performance Tasks

  • Using DnA and Google for Remote Learning

Wide Open School EL Supports

Discovery Education available through classlink

• • DE Virtual learning support, guide, and DEN

  • DE quick lessons

  • Quicksearch links: includes items specific to Math and grade level

Achieve the Core

• • ATC K-8 Learning Activities for Math: A curated, engaging selection of grade-level-specific math activities that can be completed independently or as a group (enough for four weeks of remote learning) that support a balance of conceptual thinking and reasoning, fluency practice, and application.

Google EquatIO is a math extension that allows you to write digital equations and insert, edit, and interact with digital math in the G Suite Environment, including Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Slides and Google Drawings.

Assessment tools

• • Google Forms

  • Edulastic - Some teachers have been adding OUR 7th grade assessments here

  • Go Formative

  • ATC core aligned mini-assessments

ALEKS virtual support

• • ALEKS: Parent Support