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Thursday, September 26, 2013

Math Intervention Books

Browsing through the bookstore this summer, I happened to see 2 books that I had never seen before.  The words math interventions, differentiation, games and formative assessment caught my eye.  Of course when I got home, I had to look them up on amazon and find out more about them.  You know how this can lead to buying more books, and sure enough, I decided I needed to buy them both.

Here is one for preK-2


Here is one for grades 3-5



So now that I have had them and used them for a few months, here is what I have discovered.

PeK-2 book
    This book defines 4 goals for math understanding. 
    Accuracy
    Efficiency
    Flexibility
    Fluency

These goals align with what I try to do so I was excited to jump farther into these books.  This book is also almost completely game based which is something I love when doing intervention.  Terrence are games designed to work on counting, cardinality, subsidizing, place value, basic fractions, composing and decomposing numbers and addition and subtraction facts.  All of these things support the big ideas of mathematics at the preK-2 level. Throughout the book there are also problem strings and other things to use as formative assessment to see where your students are and how much they are learning from your interventions.  

Overall, I think this is a great book for someone who teaches at preK-2 level who wants to differentiate instruction for their students or help their students catch up on important math concepts.  For special educators or para professionals who work with kids struggling in math this book would be a step in the right direction towards the type and quality of intervention kids need.  Even the veteran math specialist can learn a new trick or two from this book. 



3-5 book
     The 3-5 book picks up with some of the same games and activities around addition and subtraction facts that the preK-2 book leaves off with.  Even though this is a double of what I had in the last book, I think the placement in the 3-5 book is absolutely appropriate.  I often begin the year with third grade intervention around these very concepts.  It is important that kids have a solid foundation of additive reasoning before moving onto multiplicative reasoning.  This books also talks a great deal about efficiency of strategies which is paramount to my own math teaching.  

     In addition to the addition and subtraction fact activities, this book includes ideas and games around multiplication and division facts as well as multiplying and dividing with larger numbers, fractions, decimals, number theory and place value.  It is a nice sampling of activities that can differentiate learning and help kids catch up in math.

As with the k-2 book, I can see this books being beneficial for classroom teachers, special educators, para professionals and math specialists.  There is a great philosophy behind this book and it is packed with useful and engaging lessons.

Way resources do you use for kids who need intervention in math?





3 comments:

  1. More math books to buy? :) You're good at adding to my collection.
    ❀ Tammy
    Forever in First

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    Replies
    1. I seriously have a shelf full of math professional books at home and a shelf full at school. I currently teach math all day but reading is my passion. We can learn so much from books!

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  2. HI,hope you are well. Maybe you can advise me on something. I am a learning support teachers who tutors a children in Math. I see a group of children once a week for 1 hour. My groups are not bigger than 5 learners. Within the small group I still have children on different levels. As the aim of the game is to talk about math and letting children understand the math I do not want them to do meaningless math activities. I find myself working on a concept such as counting in 3's ans exploring the patterns while one or two other children already grasped the concept. I realise that I should be able to differentiate within the small intervention group. Do you think that the Math Intervention book allows for differentiation and secondly will one be able to compile worksheets or activities to practise new learned concepts for the rest of the week (when I do not see them).

    Do you maybe have any other suggestions for me.
    It will be great to hear from you.

    Kind regards
    Erine

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