The school system that we work for has adopted Everyday Mathematics as the district math curriculum. Everyday Math, or EDM, is a program that most of us are required to teach.
EDM is a balanced instruction program that incorporates whole group, small group, partner and individual instruction. EDM does not teach math concepts to "mastery," like most of us probably were taught, but bases its instruction on a "spiral" technique. It is unit based around six strands of knowledge: Algebra; Data and Chance; Geometry; Measurement; Numeration and Order; Patterns, Functions, and Sequences; Operations; and Reference Frames. Every grade level has very detailed goals for learning. There is quite a lot of content to cover in a school year and can feel overwhelming for both teachers and students.
Anyone who has ever talked "math" with me for longer than 5 minutes has heard my EDM is a Freight Train analogy. If our students don't get on when we stop at the station, the train moves on, and if we're lucky, they can catch up at the next stop, but if not, they are lost.
While we all struggle with differentiated instruction, and EDM does provide helpful lessons and suggestions for helping those students we might leave behind, sometimes we all need to take a breath and practice a concept a little bit longer. It is difficult for me to just "expose" students to a concept and then not let them practice or experiment with it for longer than a day. So, I do a little extra.
I highly recommend the EDM math games. I know at first I thought.."Games? In math?" But, as I dug deeper into the program, I realized that within the games is the practice my students were needing. We play Baseball multiplication, Top It, and Multiplication Bingo often.
I also like to supplement EDM with some practice worksheets that I have found at different websites. I use two websites to generate math worksheets. Both Math Drills and The Math Worksheet Site are great places to go where you can create worksheets on everything from number sense to addition and subtraction, measurement and fractions and geometry. When I slow down and teach and EDM lesson over two days, I use the worksheet as the second day's homework. I also sometimes use worksheets as a warm-up for my students to activate prior knowledge before we start a new unit.
As one of our mathematics professors used to say..."sometimes you have to slow down to speed up."
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