(To get each day's task emailed directly to you, fill in the form here).
A common saying among educators is that parents are the first teachers. Even though professional educators like myself are paid to teach other people's children, we'll never be able to replace their parents. Instead, our job is to partner with parents, who are and always will be their children's primary teachers.
Now it seems like that saying has taken on a new twist.
If you're like me, you now find yourself trying to teach/supervise the teaching of your own children while attending frequent video conference meetings. Between your children needing a snack every 48 seconds and trying to find the perfect virtual background for your Zoom video calls, you are busier now than you've ever been.
But what shouldn't be lost in all of this is the education of your child. With the remainder of this year relegated to at-home learning, there are some important questions you should consider.
Does your child know what s/he needs to know to be successful next year?
What gaps exist between what your child currently knows and what will be taught in the following grade?
If you have a 6th grader, you might not be very comfortable with the intricacies of 6th grade mathematics. Just take a look at some of the 6th grade math standards:
6.4A - compare two rules verbally, numerically, graphically, and symbolically in the form of y = ax or y = x + a in order to differentiate between additive and multiplicative relationships
6.5B - solve real-world problems to find the whole given a part and the percent, to find the part given the whole and the percent, and to find the percent given the part and the whole, including the use of concrete and pictorial models
6.12C - summarize numeric data with numerical summaries, including the mean and median (measures of center) and the range and interquartile range (IQR) (measures of spread), and use these summaries to describe the center, spread, and shape of the data distribution
Hold on! Good news is coming!
I have a YouTube channel I started several years ago called Five Minute Math. My purpose was to create tons and tons of tiny videos, each five minutes or less, that explore one component of a grade level's math expectations.
I have the entirety of 6th grade math on a playlist (63 videos). What I'm proposing is a simple partnership between you, me, and your 6th grade student.
Starting next Monday (April 13, 2020), I'll create one blog post a day, Monday through Thursday, for the next three weeks. Each of the 12 blog posts will contain links to a few of my 6th grade math videos and three or four related practice problems from a released STAAR test (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness).
The deal is simple. If you and/or your student will watch two, sometimes three, videos a day to cover 6th grade math concepts and work on three or four practice problems from a released STAAR test, we can get through the entire 6th grade math curriculum in three weeks. The videos are designed both for parents and students and each are five minutes or less.
Each night (8:00 pm CDT) that I post one of the 12 daily tasks, I'll live stream from my YouTube channel to go over the answers from that days' practice problems. I'll explain the correct answers, show why the incorrect answer choices are wrong, and answer any questions that you might have in the chat. Those videos will then be available on my channel if you can't watch them live.
The schedule of the videos and practice problems can be viewed below. If you'd like each daily blog post with the videos and practice problems sent straight to your email inbox, simply fill in the form here.
Together we can keep learning going - at least for 6th grade math!