Moving with Math Learning System

Nothing lights up a student’s face like telling them it is time to play a game. Teachers are always looking for games to reinforce conceptual knowledge, practice skills and make math fun!

This fall, we are introducing a monthly classroom resource, Moving with Math® ENGAGE, that will provide hands-on games and activities designed to build skills, confidence and engage students in their learning! These games or activities will be for elementary and middle school students and will feature a different manipulative each month.

Games are flexible and there are tips for how to modify the difficulty of the game based on the individual students’ knowledge.These games are one of the most beloved features of our programs and are a huge hit with teachers and students. We hope that these resources will help your teachers engage their students even more in their learning and make math fun!

Enter to win an Online Teacher E-guide.

Every month we will send out an email with a new game. If you send us a picture of your students playing the game and tell us what you liked about it, you will be entered in our monthly drawing to win a one-year license to an online teacher e-guide for the grade and program of your choosing.

Just send a picture that doesn’t show any of the students’ faces, only hands playing the game.

Tell us what your students enjoyed the most or learned from the game. Like…
“We started out playing Hammer to 50, but they soon were ready to move it to 100.”
“My students really helped each other as they were playing, but enjoyed being the winner!”

Just email your entry photos and information by the end of the month to [email protected].
We will announce the winner when we send out the next month’s Moving with Math® ENGAGE email.

Games

Just click the link to the game card which has all the instructions and materials needed and print it out.

Hammer to 100

This game uses base ten blocks and reinforces the idea that place value is based on groups of 10. Place value is one of the most fundamental concepts embedded in elementary school mathematics curriculum. It provides the foundation for regrouping, multiple-digit multiplication, and decimal concepts.
Click here to print

What’s My Secret?

This game uses fraction strips and helps students recognize and generate simple equivalent fractions. They also learn to compare fractions with the same numerator or denominator by reasoning about their size, or two fractions with different numerators and denominators by comparing to a benchmark fraction. Click here to print

There has been much written about the value of math talks in the classroom as a tool to engage students and strengthen understanding. Math talks or math discussions is a technique that also helps students see themselves, and their classmates, as valued mathematical thinkers. Research suggests that when students talk more about their math thinking, they are more motivated to learn, and they learn more! It also provides teachers with a valuable form of assessment, giving them insight into what students have mastered and where they still need assistance. Here are a few ideas to try in your classroom to promote more math conversations.

Promote Questioning Throughout the Lesson

The Moving with Math lessons with the Concrete – Representational – Abstract (CRA) instructional model incorporate math discourse into the classroom every day. Manipulatives are used to introduce all math concepts and allow students with varying learning styles to explore, discover and communicate their understanding. Lessons are designed to help foster more student conversation and less teacher talk. Lightly-scripted lesson plans give teachers engaging activities and questions to develop meaningful classroom discussions and foster small group interaction.

Manipulatives are used in the introductory part of the lessons and provide an engaging way to begin classroom discussions. When students are introduced to the base ten blocks, they are asked to find similarities and differences between the blocks. “How are the blocks alike? How are they different? Questioning helps to introduce mathematical ideas and concepts as well as build on those ideas throughout the lesson.

Foster Small Group Conversation about Word Problems
Helping students tackle word problems is a focus for most teachers. Moving with Math’s five-part problem solving model provides a framework that gives students a plan for success. Students are introduced to the steps and strategies and then can work in pairs or small groups to solve problems. This small group setting gives students a chance to share and verbalize their ideas and may help ELL students who might feel more comfortable asking questions in a smaller setting.

Explicitly Teach How to have Math Conversations

Sentence starters are a great way to teach students about meaningful math conversations. Teachers use sentence starters to encourage peer communication and foster language acquisition in small groups or as a whole class. They can also be used to build on knowledge or to discover student strategies. For example, students can explain their moves in a game or strategies for playing a game using teacher provided sentence starters.

In the game “What’s My Secret?”, students select fraction strips that are alike in one way. To guess the secret, students could be given the starter. “The fraction bars are alike because _______________?”

Sentence starts are a great way To Connect Ideas. Teachers could start with “Subtraction and regrouping are connected because_____________? They are also a wonderful way to Extend Thinking, teachers could use the starter “Subtraction and division are similar because_____________?

Insightful Formative Assessment Options
In addition to summative assessments there are many formative assessments built-in throughout the curriculum. There are SUM it Up, Conceptual Understanding, Key Ideas and Journal Prompts that each promote math discussion and give teachers opportunities to assess understanding in different ways.

If you want to learn more about how math talk is woven into our lessons and the Moving with Math Learning System click here to receive our catalog.

It has been an honor and privilege to work with the many Department of Defense Educational Activity (DoDEA) educational professionals all over the world this past year and a half. Like other educators in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, they are working tirelessly to help their struggling students find success in math using the Moving with Math® program.

In addition to hands-on Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) lessons, DoDEA educators have access to e-guides and online assessment which they have used in various virtual and hybrid settings at their schools to keep learning engaging and productive. For them, online assessment allows teachers to track individual student progress on standard objectives and have that information follow them as they travel within the worldwide DoDEA system.

For Math Teachers Press, the partnership has been challenging and exciting as we developed professional development relationships with the DoDEA Instructional Support Specialists and Intervention Teachers in DoDEA’s three regions. Through virtual trainings and recorded modules they have the knowledge, information and skills to implement the Moving with Math Extensions program with fidelity. We are moved by their dedication to the children of military and finding ways to support them throughout their educational journey.

If you wish to learn more about our partnership with DoDEA Click Here to read the full Press Release or email Mary LaBanca at [email protected]

In a recent article in a December District Administration newsletter, Matt Zalaznick wrote about two strategies that were being highly touted approaches to reverse COVID learning loss by equity experts on a National Press Foundation panel. In his article he quoted several of the panel members.

Achievements gaps existed long before COVID, so a return to the K-12 status quo after the pandemic could leave already struggling students farther behind. “For a lot of kids, COVID is a disaster. For a whole lot of kids, it was a disaster long before COVID,” said Katharine B. Stevens, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of  “Still Left Behind: How America’s schools keep failing our children.” “The only way to head off an enormous catastrophe is to find a new approach,” Stevens said. Extensive national and statewide tutoring programs, and accelerated academics are two strategies that could help students recover from COVID-era learning loss.

Moving with Math was designed to be used in both of these learning settings and has proven to boost student achievement gains. After School and Summer programs using the Learning System have proven successful with struggling students in school districts across the country.

If you wish to read the full article. https://districtadministration.com/reverse-covid-learning-loss-tutoring-accelerated-academies/?eml=20201211&oly_enc_id=

In efforts to improve our education system for All students, the Every Student Succeeds Act has developed evidence-based criteria for evaluating curriculum. Evidence-based interventions are practices or programs that have evidence to show that they are effective at producing results and improving outcomes when implemented. The kind of evidence described in ESSA has generally been produced through formal studies and research.

Under ESSA, there are four tiers of evidence:

Tier 1 – Strong Evidence: supported by one or more well-designed and well-implemented randomized control experimental studies.

Tier 2 – Moderate Evidence: supported by one or more well-designed and well-implemented quasi-experimental studies.

Tier 3 – Promising Evidence: supported by one or more well-designed and well-implemented correlational studies (with statistical controls for selection bias).

Tier 4 – Demonstrates a Rationale: practices that have a well-defined logic model or theory of action, are supported by research, and have some effort underway by an SEA, LEA or outside research organization to determine their effectiveness.

Moving with Math meets the ESSA Tier 2 criteria in a large study conducted by George Washington University Center for Equity and Excellence in Education of over 11,000 District of Columbia students in grades 1-8. The results showed statistically significant achievement gains on both the Moving with Math Pre to Post-Tests, as well as Standardized tests given in the Fall and Spring.

Read More

Want to read the complete study? Click Here

Summer is officially starting this week, but educators around the country have been hard at work during summer school helping their students bridge the gap during this crucial learning opportunity. Our trainers have been all over the country working with teachers, principals and administrators implementing custom summer school curriculum to meet their goals. We have been impressed by the dedication of the education professionals who are determined to help their students and believe in the Moving with Math Learning System to improve learning and achievement.

Over and over we heard administrators reminding teachers that summer school needs to be engaging and animated so that the environment is motivating. We worked with the teachers to help insure success by demonstrating our manipulative based lessons for those critical math concepts at each grade. All lessons use the Concrete-Representational-Abstract instruction method that help these struggling students truly understand the concepts so they can use it to build further knowledge. The teachers were enthusiastic and loved the scripted lesson plans that helped them maximize the use of the manipulatives.

Many of the summer schools are using our web based assessment to maximize their teacher’s time, quickly pinpoint individual student weaknesses and develop a summer learning plan and then give them a roadmap for the fall. At a recent implementation workshop in Georgia, we were pleased that they found the system so easy to use and were excited by the detailed information it gave them as they developed their classroom plans.

Most schools are also working on reading and loved that many of the lessons incorporate ties to literature. We shared some of our favorite stories like The Doorbell Rang and Apple Fractions and the many activities that they could do to tie math and reading together. Everyone left the workshops ready for the start of summer school armed with the tools to make it a success.

If you like to learn more about our proven program or interested in receiving a list of those key math concepts by grade just email us at [email protected]. Happy summer learning!

Complete Story

Speaking at the National Title 1 Conference in February, Sean Healy, District Lead Teacher for RISE in Jersey City Public Schools Special Education Department, reported that math achievement had increased 24% for students At or Above Grade Level on the ADAM during the 2015-16 school. He credits this improvement to careful planning and implementation of their tiered system of support and using the Moving with Math Foundations program as either a core or supplemental math program for their over 2600 special education students.

Mr. Healy has been guiding his teachers and students on a path of success for the past five years. This large urban district with over 36 Title 1 schools has also shown improvement on state testing surpassing other districts with similar student populations on the PARCC assessment. The only other urban district who performed slightly better was Elizabeth, NJ and they also use the Moving with Math Learning System!
During his presentation, Mr. Healy outlined their district’s efforts and their partnership with Math Teachers Press. He noted that his teachers loved that “Moving with Math provides concrete activities for difficult concepts in an easy to understand format and that students learn to represent and model the abstract math to promote deeper understanding.”

When asked about his teacher’s favorite lessons he said “Most of the fraction lessons, especially at the younger grades, get rave reviews. Students being able to see what a fraction really is and compare different fractions with the models, both the circles and the bars, is very powerful.” These carefully designed manipulative activities are key to building student understanding of number sense, patterns and relationships, the critical concepts necessary to raise achievement.

Mr. Healy noted that the Moving with Math Learning System was a “Perfect fit for New Jersey’s Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) and matched well with the spirit and content of New Jersey’s new standards.” He noted that they were planning expanded use throughout the district and improved implementation with fidelity as future goals and looked forward to continued support and customization from the staff at Math Teachers Press.

St. Paul Public Schools have used the Moving with Math Extensions program for the past three summers. In 2016 they used it district wide with over 12,000 students and achieved terrific results.

“Students Showed Amazing Improvement”
Elizabeth Putnam – Assistant Director, Department of Alternative Education – St. Paul Schools

Complete Results

St. Paul Public Schools implemented the Moving with Math Foundations program in Fall 2013 as their RTI solution. Positive feedback from administrators and teachers, along with improved scores and increases in students’ conceptual understanding of math, led them to implement the Moving with Math EXTENSIONS program as their Summer Math solution.

The easy-to-use Moving with Math Learning System, following the Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) instructional model, is the ideal Summer School solution. Everything is organized in the customized pacing plans including the Assessment Tools for identifying students’ needs and monitoring their progress. Professional Development happens every day through the Scripted Lesson Plans assuring that all teachers communicate effectively. Students with a variety of learning styles and languages find that using concrete manipulatives helps them develop better understanding making them confident, successful learners.

St. Paul administrators also commented that the professional customer service they receive is fantastic. Math Teachers Press provides support for the district and assists in everything from customized lesson plans, teacher training, organizing location material quantities and deliveries. Plans are underway for 2019 and St. Paul is anticipating another exciting summer of great results for their students!

Afterschool Curriculum Choice: Mathematics Resources is an initiative of PEAR, the Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency at Harvard University and the SEDL National Center for Quality Afterschool. This Guide was conceived, compiled and coordinated by a team at PEAR in collaboration with SEDL to help practitioners locate and make informed choices about high-quality mathematics resources to enrich their programs. Moving with Math was included in the Guide with curriculum selected based on proven use in afterschool settings, and include challenging lesson plans and organized activities.

You can read the entire review here.

NCSM’s National Conference in Boston had Monday’s lunch provided by Moving with Math® and heard Dr. Sonja Goerdt speak on supporting teachers in implementing the use of manipulatives in the classroom across all grade levels. Using the NCSM’s position paper, Improving Student Achievement in Mathematics by Using Manipulatives with Classroom Instruction, she took a hands-on approach to sharing practical ideas on the use of manipulatives to develop critical math concepts.