Monday through Thursday children will complete Daily Math Review. Daily Math Review is a written activity that provides retention and practice of math skills previously taught. There are six components to the Daily Math Review: Number Sense, Computation, Algebra and Functions, Geometry, Measurment, and Problem Solving. Children complete this independently and then we go over the answers together. The teacher then verbally reads three Mental Math Problems. Children are not permitted to use pencils or fingers to help find the solutions to these problems. Children are encouraged to mentally visualize a solution and then write the final answer. The Mental Math Problems contain several steps of processing. On Friday a Daily Math Review Quiz and Mental Math Quiz are generated over the same skills and graded by the teacher.
In Second Grade children are expected to be able to complete 100 math fact problems in five minutes or less with 96% accuracy or better. Monday through Thursday the children are given practice tests. The math facts test given on Friday is graded by the teacher. At the beginning of the year, we will focus on addition. Starting the second grading period, subtraction will be added to the focus. Leaving Second Grade, children must be able to complete 100 addition facts in five minutes or less with 96% accuracy or better as well as 100 subtraction facts. Learning these facts in this way will provide a greater success in multiplication and division next year.
On Thursday our focus is Problem of the Week and Write Up. The Problem of the Week is a multiple step story problem. Children must use pictures, numbers, and words to solve the problem. Once a solution is found the children use sentences to explain the solution process in the Write Up. The Write Up is organized by these five words: First, Next, Then, After that, and Finally. At the beginning of the year much modeling is done by the teacher and the children gradually gain indepence of these processes.
The Big Idea is the time during Math Workshop where new skills are introduced and practiced.