Curriculum

I've finally gotten the book that I will be teaching out of. It is called Math Connects, by Glencoe. We are piloting the curriculum so this is a 2009 book, and the curriculum hasn't been used before. There is so much material included with the kit. In addition to the central text book and teacher editions of said text book there are two levels of horozontally alligned books designed to fulfil the needs of students who are below level in their achievement and to suppliment the regular book with investigative lessons and activities. In addition to the three sets of books, there are four cds that have software and documents on them. Each section of the book (eg. 3-4) has 6 different work sheets that are on the cds. These can be printed out and used as homework, extra credit or however you want to. They are differentated so that some worksheets are suited for below average students, some for special needs, some for English Language Learners (ELL) and some for students who are above average. A few of the worksheets are even available in Spanish. It's a great opportunity for differentiation for homework to. Some of the 6th grade teachers have expessed concern over the fact that their classes are heterogeneus as far as math levels are concerned. Without a lot of extra effort we can catagorize students based on pre-assesment and assign different homework for different students so that the advanced students are still challanged, but the struggling students still can get the extra help.

The one big drawback that I've noticed with this curriculum so far is that hte book is not arranged the same way that the Oregon State Standards are (the now core points). In the state standards, fractions and decimals are ordered based on operation. As part of standard 6.0, the students should learn to add and subtract both fractions and decimals. Then during 6.1 they learn to multiply and divide both fractions and decimals. The books organized by catagory. One chapter on performing operations on decimals, followed by a chapter on converting between fractions and decimals, and then there is a chapter on perfoming operations on fractions. While this drawback creates a little more work for techers, and means that teachers must coordinate more in order to keep several classes in the same place, it is not a huge hurdle to jump over.

This is of course my preliminary impression, I have yet to begin my untit planning since Mrs. Keener and I need to me with Mr. Smith, the other 6th grade math teacher, and plan out which chapters we are doing in which order.