Interleaving

So this really fun thing happened in the province I live in this year: A new curriculum was implemented for grades K-6 in math. I say "really fun" but it has actually been the anathema of my existence, because it wasn't rolled out one grade at a time. What this means for my grade 6 students, is that last year, in grade 5, they learned from the old grade 5 math curriculum. This year, they are learning from the new grade 6 curriculum. This may not have been the worst thing to ever happen, except that the new grade 6 curriculum covers topics that appear for the first time in old grade 7 and 8 curriculum (well, it's still current for any grades above 6). So now my sweet babies are required to learn all these essentially grade 7 and 8 concepts, when they haven't even learned the basic concepts that normally would have been covered in the old grade 6 curriculum. And then, next year in grade 7 they'll just learn the exact same stuff all over again (maybe not a bad thing but a little bit frustrating).

And to top it all off, at the end of the school year they will be required to write a standardized test aligned with the new curriculum.

So long story short, I've spent an inordinate amount of time on fractions, specifically, because many of the curriculum gaps are related to fractions. Now that I've taught my kiddos all the concepts, I want to make sure they stick, so I created these interleaved practice sheets for them to do, and I'm super proud of them so naturally I needed to blog about them!

Interleaving is a concept which has been proven very effective to aid in long term memory (Dunlosky et al, 2013) and the idea is that you alternate between different concepts when reviewing so that you have the opportunity to make connections between the different concepts and it also allows you to temporarily forget little bits of information which actually helps strengthen our memory as we retrieve the forgotten information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLBlhwUrGaU

So I made my kiddos this little practice sheet, and every day for a week they will complete one, and then they get to go on an app for a bit of fun review, but this way I can see which concepts they might be struggling with AND they get the spaced practice as they complete it each day.

With great fortitude,

-M💗