Math Intervention

Depending on the severity of a child's math issues, intervention may require at minimum 2 and up to 3, 60-minute sessions a week. Initial assessment results help me identify areas of need and program placement. Sessions may include remediation in some or all of the following: number sense, place value, fact fluency, strategies for learning algorithms, algebraic thinking, solving single and multi-step problems, word problem strategies, error analysis, organizing work, supporting working memory & long-term memory deficits, and building visual-spatial skills.

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Math assessments tend to be informal assessments of grade level math concepts including assessment of number skills, fluency, and basic operations. I tend to approach math intervention a bit differently than most in that I try to work with the child at as close to grade level as possible. While I want to identify areas of stretch, I also don't want to fall into the trap of preventing a child from moving forward before mastering a skill. I have found that fluency skills can continue to develop as students engage in grade level math problems. For late elementary and middle school students, this can make or break their attitudes about themselves as mathematical thinkers.

 

In early elementary (k-2), my focus is on developing number sense, place value understanding, and addition, subtraction, and multiplication fact fluency. Recent research has found that a linear approach math intervention fails to help students make adequate progress. For this reason, while I continue to support fluency, number sense, and place value understanding, I teach them in context of more grade appropriate skills. For students in 3rd - 5th grade, the emphasis is on building fluency in all four operations, teaching mastery of algorithms, helping students see patterns and connections between operations, developing word problem strategies, and ensuring students have a strong understanding of fractions (which is one of the biggest predictors of later math success). By 6th grade, students can often get stuck in remedial math classes if interventions continue to focus to much on waiting for students to master operations before moving on. My focus in middle school includes light work in fact and operational fluency within the context of grade level problems, with a shift towards deepening understanding of place value (including decimals), integers and the number line, improving fraction fluency, algebraic thinking & reasoning, and deepening work with analyzing patterns and relationships. As students get older, we work on developing strategies for note-taking and organizing work, and work on using tools to support deficits.

 

Here are a list of research-based math strategies that I use and a list of websites and programs I use (which can also be found in the Overview). By having students work fluency programs outside of our session, I can focus our session time on bridging the gap between where they're at and where they need to be.