Family Materials

Nothing contributes more to a child’s success than an involved and supportive adult!

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Math III Family Letter

Nothing contributes more to a child’s success than an involved and supportive adult!

Current educational research and developments in instructional practice have made it possible for your child to learn mathematics through a better way than the traditional mode of instruction. In the book Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) emphasizes that effective teaching of mathematics “ensures that the learning of procedures is developed over time, on a strong foundation of understanding and the use of student-generated strategies in solving problems. This approach supports students in developing the ability to understand and explain their use of procedures, choose flexibly among methods and strategies to solve contextual and mathematical problems, and produce accurate answers efficiently. (p 46).” The Open Up High School Mathematics path to learning reflects NCTM’s stance regarding durable learning by building procedural fluency through a learning cycle approach. Our approach always begins by developing conceptual understanding through student agency with a task that invites students to use their own logic to surface ideas and approaches to solving problems. Once these ideas have surfaced and a need for more efficient processes have been established, students are moved by the teacher’s guidance towards becoming fluent and flexible with the mathematics.

Your child’s mathematical adventure will begin in a classroom setting, where they will be encouraged to actively engage in tasks that have been carefully designed to help them deepen and connect their mathematical knowledge. During the classroom experience, after students have grappled with a task, they will enhance their understanding through a teacher-structured discussion with peers as they share their ways of seeing the mathematics unfold. It is the teacher who orchestrates this discussion by using student work to highlight the purpose of each lesson. In this type of classroom student thinking is valued and respected. We want students to believe in their own ability to do mathematics while still acquiring the efficiency of doing mathematics in the way established by the mathematical community.

Following each classroom experience, your child will be assigned Ready, Set, Go problems. These assignments have been correlated with the daily classroom experience and should be completed each day, so that the student is prepared for the next lesson. Students will often have worked examples for the Ready, Set, Go problems located in the Retrieval section of the lesson.

Here is how you can support your child to succeed in mathematics:

• Support your child’s teacher by valuing the classroom experience.

• Encourage your child to engage in the classroom task, try new strategies, be inventive, regard mistakes as learning opportunities, and learn from the classroom discussion.

• If your student needs help, check to see that they are doing the work of the daily task and recording the mathematics that has been the focus of the lesson. Check your student’s Takeaway notes that they have recorded in class. The Takeaways help the student keep track of the important ideas and strategies.

• Use the student Self-Assessments to celebrate the progress of student learning and identify areas that your student still needs to master.