Math Program
In the 2007-08 school year, Long Lake, Central and Blair Elementary were selected to pilot the New Investigations Mathematics Curriculum. Its success lead to the program be implemented throughout the district in the 2008-09 school year. The Investigations in Number, Data and Space is a K-5th grade complete mathematics curriculum designed to engage students in making sense of mathematical ideas. The curriculum is a revision of our previous program and has many new components to support our students and parents. The curriculum is also much more closely aligned to our new state mathematics benchmarks.
The goals of the curriculum are:
- Support students to make sense of mathematics and learn that they can be mathematical thinkers. This is a very different type of mathematics, which will serve students well far beyond elementary school. The mathematics of the future will demand the type of thinking that can apply mathematical concepts to new situations. The skill of problem finding will be required in most jobs.
- Focus on computational fluency with whole numbers and fractions. If you observe how children attack problems in ways that you have never thought about, it is because the children understand how numbers work together. Often they arrive at answers quickly because of this base of understanding. This is what we mean by fluency. 10 minutes each day will be devoted to students working on traditional computation skills.
- Children are provided an opportunity to develop knowledge in important areas of mathematics including geometry, measurement, data and early algebra. The curriculum helps children foster connections between these strands of mathematics. We typically learned these strands as isolated topics, not realizing their interconnectedness.
- Children learn to reason mathematically. One of our parents last week talked to me about how this reasoning ability carries over into so many different areas of their child’s life.
- The materials provide for a wide range of learners, from those who struggle to children who have strong insights into mathematics. We would like to show you how this works in a classroom of so many types of learners.
Families are important partners with schools in the process of teaching mathematics. For this reason, the curriculum provides many home/school connections to support their children’s learning.