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Daily Routines

Routine Descriptions and Helpful Hints

Daily Math Review

Mental Math

Thinking Skillls

Daily Math Review

Research indicates that skills practiced to a peak of smoothness and automaticity tend to be retained indefinitely, whereas skills that are mastered only partially tend to deteriorate. Most skills included in school curricula are learned best when practice is distributed across time and embedded within a variety of tasks.

Helpful Tips

The daily review sheets should be run off for each student and then cut into half and given almost daily.
Don’t spend more than five minutes on the whole sheet because they will get another one tomorrow.
Options for checking
- Obviously you could read the answers and simply have the students check and record their results.
- You could have students in pairs or groups compare their answers for each item and if they all have the same answer, count it correct. If there are differences, have them find the error(s) and correct it and be able to explain the mistakes.
- You could survey the class (have them close their eyes and hold up their hand if they missed #1, #2, etc.) and if you feel one item needs additional work, spend a few minutes on the explanation.
Walk around while the students are working on their sheets and assess how they are doing. Make gentle reminders when appropriate. Remember this is review and any review problem may need more developmental procedures to correct. But at least you can become aware of each student’s skill level.
Recording Scores
- You could have a contest from week to week to see who is highest or who improved the most. Focus on individual improvement and pride in one’s own work.
- You could keep a class running record on the number of correct responses and graph it. If the review sheets have 5 problems each and you have 25 kids, you could make a class goal of 100, or better yet a range to 100 like 85 – 100. On random selected review sheets, students would get a score, combine it with others around them and then combine all the group scores into a class score. This could them be charted from one time to the next. You could even ask students how the class might get a better score next time having them come up with a plan.
- You could introduce bowling to third through eighth grade students. If they got all items correct, they would get a strike. If they missed some then corrected the mistake, they would get a spare. You could then complete the game and keep the average scores for each student.
Changing Items
- If you are using the pdf version, you can change items on the sheets by writing examples on the board and having students cross off an item and copy down your example instead.
- If you are using the word version, you can change the items directly in the document.
Remember
Be creative. With these review sheets you can start further in your book, with the first really interesting new concept. The daily reviews can replace much of that practice at the beginning of the book. If you don’t use a book, this five-minute review will keep skills fresh in the students’ minds.

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Mental Math

Calculating in your head is a practical life skill. We calculate mentally almost on a daily basis. Mental math strategies can make written computation easier or quicker, contribute to increased skill in estimation, and lead to better understanding of place value, mathematical operations, and basic number properties. Students need experiences with mental computation to improve their understanding of number and increase their flexibility and fluency as they work with numbers. These strategies can then result in improvement for students on standardized tests of computation and problem solving. Mental computational strategies are quite personal, being dependent on a student’s creativity, flexibility, and understanding of number concepts and properties. Therefore one of the instructional keys is to have student discussions of potential strategies.

Helpful Hints

The mental math sheets are to be read to your students. They provide examples for you to use. You can add or delete as you see fit.
Read the exercises to the students and have them quickly write the answers. Allow 5-7 seconds per question.
Check immediately.
Ask the students what they thought about to get the answers.This sharing of strategies is important since students can hear and adopt other, possibly more efficient, strategies.
Expand these to iinclude mental math which will be needed for today's, tomorrow's, and next week's lessons.

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Thinking Skills

Questions designed around thinking skills invite students to think mathematically, formulate and communicate new ideas, justify procedures, and defend the reasonableness of their answers. Thinking skills and reasoning processes are critical elements to designing purposeful questions and tasks. They are attributes many of us want students to possess and many times they are found in our standards and benchmarks and in our "Student Learning Goals". Students' responses to those questions and tasks give you information that helps you assess what they know. We need to make sure that we give students the opportunity and practice this kind of thinking.

Concept Previews

Thinking Skills Under Development

	Number & Operations	Algebra	Geometry	Measurement	Data Analysis

Compare/Contrast

Error Analysis

Constructing Support

Analyzing Perspectives

Problem Solving

Invention

Induction

Deduction

Show Me What You Know

Concept Previews Under Development

	Number & Operations	Algebra	Geometry	Measurement	Data Analysis

Grade 1

Grade 2

Grade 3

Grade 4

Grade 5

Grade 6

Grade 7

Grade 8