S'more Math
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Four Ways to Beat the Summer Math Slump Highlight the math in every day activities.
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All West Utica students... have a free math Zearn Account. The username is their first and last name without a space. Many students were assigned the password, "zearn12345." If you are having difficulty logging your child in from home, please email Mrs. Stevens at [email protected] and she will be happy to help you retrieve all the necessary information. |
Summer Math Loss Why kids lose math knowledge, and how families can work to counteract it The reason? Many parents — and their children — don’t think about math as existing outside of the classroom. “Parents often think that their kids learn math in school, and that it’s sort of the school’s domain,” says Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) doctoral student Kathleen Lynch. Many parents “may just be less inclined to do math at home,” she says. “Reading activities are often part of the fabric of a family’s daily life,” saysJoanna Christooulou, an HGSE faculty member and an assistant professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. “But if you try to imagine a bedtime math routine, as you might for reading, the idea of winding down by completing math equations doesn’t elicit the same interest. The issue isn’t that engaging math activities are not available outside of school, but rather that it is easy to overlook the presence of math in everyday activities, like measurement in cooking, calculation when dealing with money, or distance while driving.” As a result, when the school year ends, kids may have very few opportunities to engage in any type of mathematical thinking. It’s likely that most of the resulting loss involves procedures, not general concepts, the researchers say. An incoming fifth grader may retain the conceptual idea that division means separating things out into equal groups, but it’s easy for her to forget the set of steps to solving a long division problem. But getting students to remember those procedures isn’t as easy as just assigning them summer math homework. In a recent study, Lynch and summer learning expert James S. Kim , an associate professor at HGSE, examined the effects of a summer math intervention in which students were given access to an online math program and asked to do three “playlists,” or worksheets, a week. While the majority of students did use the program, their math scores showed no improvement at the end of the summer. So just assigning worksheets without mentoring or guidance, Lynch concludes, probably won’t correct summer math loss. Families will need to adopt a more integrated approach. BY: Leah Shafer, Harvard Graduate School of Education, June 24, 2016 |