I wish I had more time to think and write about this.  As a math educator, I have a lot of feelings about how we sometimes over accelerate students. I wish that families and administrators understood how much standards have changed. Not only do we teach Algebra 1 earlier and earlier, but we have pushed down so many of those standards to earlier and earlier grades.  As an instructional coach in a school that serves high ability students I see every day the impacts of families and parents pushing for acceleration and students skipping math content. Kids are bright and they need to be challenged, I agree. 

But math is not like history or English. You might be wildly successful in 9th grade World History having skipped 8th grade US History, but 7th grade math depends heavily on 6th grade math and skipping content isn't always the answer. 

And yet here I find myself as a parent of a 6th grade Pre-Algebra student who really wants to stay in the class. But also hasn't fully learned 6th grade content and is trying to understand 7th and 8th.  I'll be fully transparent here. I have 50/50 custody of my son and I don't have a co-parent that prioritizes or understands this the way I do. So we do ALOT of math on the nights he is with me. 

So I've been using my favorite curricular resources. I wanted to take some time to share some of them with all of you. 

There are so many places where Indiana Standards support learning a variety of ways to solve a problem.  Here is a 6th grade example. 

• 6.RP.4 Solve real-world and other mathematical problems involving rates and ratios using models  and strategies such as reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations.

Yest we ourselvess rarely learned math using these rich visual models and we struggle sometimes to figure out how to help our students use them. That's where I think Open Up Resources does a really good job. 

I have found I needed to start at the 6th grade level with my son but then he was able to use tables and double number lines effectively for percent problems. 

I think that once you dive deeply into the representations in 6th grade, they become easier when  they tackle proportional reasoning in the 7th grade standards. The problem below is at the 7th grade level and a percent decrease problem. 

Finally---there are a lot of resources that teachers use that parents can use too. One of mya favorites is the Indiana Assessment Framework for math and all of the amazing things it links to.  I made a little video of me exploring it so you would have some ideas.