Help With Teaching Elementary Math Facts

As these final days are winding down, I find myself thinking more about what I want to change next year.

One thing that I need to do more of with the kids is practice basic skills. I take a couple weeks at the beginning of the school year to review/teach the basic skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, but it doesn't seem to have been enough with the clientele I have had this year.

The kids that I teach have fallen behind and fallen through the cracks of the normal system. Many of them are extremely bright, but simply didn't go to school or do their work. However, I have many other students that are significantly behind in basic skills. I did have this problem with my students in Mississippi, but oddly enough, not to the same extent. My impoverished students in Mississippi knew their multiplication tables better than my students at this alternative school.

So my idea has been that I will actually take time each day to review, practice, and drill basic math facts. However, I don't have any training in elementary math techniques. I was thinking of doing a timed test every day - the kind I remember doing in elementary school where you did all the problems you could in a certain amount of time. However, I want to make sure I'm doing this effectively.

I am definitely looking for suggestions on how to go about setting this up and how to reward and encourage students to do well. Should I do flash cards like I remember my teachers doing in elementary school or is there some new research that has other ideas about the best way to reinforce basic facts? Are timed tests a good way to go to practice or is there another new idea in the elementary world for that as well? Would a chart with stickers for students who pass off different facts be effective, i.e. a student perfectly does his 3's multiplication flash cards gets a sticker on the chart?

Any ideas are appreciated - again I am completely green when it comes to teaching elementary math concepts.

The End of the Year....Finally!

We have five and a half days of school left. I have made it through another year of school. There are many reasons that this is significant to me.

From a curriculum standpoint, I am in the middle of the experimental end of the year portfolio project with my Algebra classes. So far I think it's going really well. The portfolio works like this:

• I gave the kids a list of all the topics we have covered this year and a list of alternate assessment activities that they could do - everything from writing a letter to a friend who was absent to writing a rap to performing a puppet show to making a news broadcast.
  
• The task is for the students to match different topics with different activities. All the activities are worth different numbers of points. Some of them are 10 points and some are 20 points. The students have to pick a combination of activities that add up to 100 points.
• If they want extra credit opportunities, I have a list of extra activities that they can do separately like write a math autobiography, or research a famous mathematician, or make a collage of pictures from magazines or newspapers or the internet that demonstrate math in the real world.

I never know how these types of projects will go, but right now it's going very well. I have received email submissions of PowerPoint presentations and websites that students have created already on certain topics. They have been quite good and not plagiarized. Overall I think the students are having fun because they get to pick the activities that interest them. I like it because it's low maintenance for me and an easy way to wrap up the year.

From a "wrap up the year" standpoint, our school will be graduating 20 students. 20 STUDENTS! We only have 55 students and every single senior that we accepted will be graduating. Some of them are graduating with a 28 credit diploma and some are graduating with the special 22 credit diploma, but they are all graduating!

We as a staff are very proud of them and the work they have done. On a personal note, I am very proud of the students, but I'm also extremely proud of the work that all of the staff has done to help these students. While the students are the ones that earned the grades, these kids were so far behind and had so much to do that it would have been impossible without the tireless efforts of this special staff. Everyone here comes in early and stays late almost every day. It's a very special crew of people at this school. I've been extremely grateful to be a part of it.

From a personal standpoint, I have made it through the year in one piece. I have not quit or been discouraged about my teaching or given up on the system. This is significant because I have been timid and gun shy since I left Mississippi. I thought I never wanted to teach again. I felt like a failure, but I wasn't.

I have just proved that not only am I a good teacher, but I make a difference with kids where it counts. The kids that I teach every day really do need me. They are the forgotten ones...the ones who fell through the cracks...the kids that no one else could handle. I have not reached every single one, but I have reached a significant number of them.

And 20 of my students are graduating from high school.

I simply want to say to all those in Mississippi who were angry with me for leaving or mad at me for "giving the program a bad name," what would you say now? Would you write me off like you did before? Could you finally admit that possibly the problem wasn't me leaving, it was the situation I was put in and the lack of support I received?

I am not a failure. This is my redemption. No matter what happened in the past, my kids are graduating, and I had a part in that success.