On Monday I will be welcoming a diverse group of learners to our Middle School Math Summer Success Program. Thirteen EL students will join my class of 12 for two hours of collaborative learning Monday-Thursday for the next four weeks. Here’s the breakdown by grade level:
- Nine rising seventh graders
- Nine rising eighth graders
- Seven rising ninth graders
The middle school math summer program previously had no curriculum, so for the past month I’ve been planning daily learning experiences. Students in the middle school EL summer program historically did not receive math instruction so combining the groups makes sense. It will be a large class but thankfully my EL colleague will help facilitate.
While the curriculum is not perfect, my goal is to provide a collaborative multi-age learning environment and meet each students’ grade level academic needs.
To give you an idea, here’s the weekly structure:
As you can see every day begins with a number talk. The number talk resource I’m using is from Math Solutions. To help monitor the learning, my EL colleague and I will be using a classroom observation checklist from Formative 5. Many of the group lessons/tasks are from either the Mathematics Assessment Project, Stenhouse’s Well Played middle school series, or James Tanton’s Curriculum Inspirations. Grade level review is primarily skills practice pulled from similar homework problems students encountered during the year.
When putting this together my original thought was to load all electronic copies on Canvas and have students work from their iPads. Then I said to myself, “Nah, this is going to be technology free.” As a result I spent an hour and a half at the copier preparing two weeks worth of copies.
I’m looking forward to teaching this multi-age summer school program. The students enrolled perhaps never had a chance to be a “lead learner.” Now they’ll have that opportunity.
Curiouser and Curiouser 
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