Math homework doesn’t have to be a worksheet!
Thanks to my colleague, Jessica Marchant, who introduced me to her version of math homework this year, my students and parents have come to enjoy math homework in a new, engaging, and non-family-time-intrusive way. It’s based on the AVMR Math training our elementary teachers received. The training gave me a better understanding of how children learn math, the types of activities that can be used to progress students’ math skills, and assessments that pinpoint math constructs.
In a nutshell, students work at their instructional level on simple game-based math activities. Each day, students take home their math recording sheet. It contains the written directions for activity options, as well as spots for parents to record math work completed and comments. Version 1 was used the month of October and November. I revamped it for December to include math apps and sites that compliment the math activities.
Download Math Homework Sheet
I spent a couple of weeks introducing each of the activities to students prior to sending this sheet home. In addition, my students helped me create videos for each activity. Click the top left-hand corner to gain access to all math videos!
Parent response has been very positive! During the first round, I created an FAQ document for parents. Paired with my at-school AVMR Math Baggies, student growth has been amazing!
11 Comments
Thank you Jessica for sharing this. My teaching partner and I have been talking about doing something like this for our classes. This will help a lot.
Glad to help out!!
Wonderful! Thank you so very much for sharing this! I have been wanting to do something similar but didn’t know how to start… Thank you!
Glad to help!!
I love this idea! Thanks so much for sharing all of it! I’m just curious: how did you determine each individual student’s number? I’m also wondering how ofter you plan to change the activities? And one last question – I promise! How many activities do you expect each student to complete each week?
Again, thanks for sharing your great work!
Great question! I’ll add this information to the post after school today, but for now, I have a class recording sheet. I pull students one at a time and ask them to identify the partners of each number up through the number they’ve been working on. So if they’re working on 6, I assess 4, 5, and 6. The prompt follows this pattern: “What goes with 4 to make ____.” It’s pretty quick. Sometimes I do this as I walk down the hallway or while we’re at snack!
Thank you for sharing your work. We are engaging our families by using a model of parent/teacher conference developed by Maria Paredes called Academic Parent Teacher Teams (http://www.wested.org/service/academic-parent-teacher-teams-aptt-family-engagement-in-education/). Your resources will be a nice addition to the activities we share with families. Again, thank you for sharing.
Thanks for the comments! Glad to help. 😉
I would love to start this in my First Grade classroom. I am a first year teacher. Do you use this Math Activity Options Menu the entire year for homework? Do you change it any?
Yes…all year long! I changed it after the first few weeks. You can see version one and two in the Dropbox folder. In two weeks, it will change again. I plan to really individualize each student’s sheet with what they need to help progress them to the next level in math. Check back for what that looks like. It will be a separate/new post on the blog!
[…] to move away from worksheet-based math homework, I created math activity choice charts. Check out this post for more […]