If you’re doing it right, Rocket Math should be a highlight of the day.
Doing Rocket Math ought to be one of the highlights of the school day. If done correctly students should really enjoy daily practice, getting better, learning to go fast on facts.
Find out if you (or your staff) know just how to do Rocket Math right by taking the 20-question Quiz that Dr. Don has posted onto the website with the answer key. You can find it on the website under Resources/Educator Resources as well as on the link in the previous sentence.
New information! There are some questions in the quiz that are not even answered in the directions! For example:
13. Any day there are an odd number of students in the class the teacher should**
____(a) ask students who have no partner to quietly sit through practice time.
____(b) be the partner of the student who doesn’t have a partner.
____(c) have a top student designated who practices alone.
____(d) have a group of three students who practice together.
There are tricks of the trade–ideas that have been put into blogs, which are part of the 20 item quiz. Some of these tricks were not known at the time of the original Teacher Directions, which are still a good source of info about how to do Rocket Math.
An excellent in-service activity for experienced staff.
Dr. Don recommends that you print out the quiz and give it out to the teachers in a staff meeting. Be sure to print out a copy of the answer key here. Then after you give the quiz to the staff, you can discuss the correct answers using the answer key. This is a great activity to engage all your staff, new and old, in a discussion of how to implement Rocket Math. Care in the implementation makes a lot of difference in how much students enjoy the experience and how successfully they learn. Remember, that the best motivator is success, so enabling success for all students is the key!
As always, if you have a question feel free to call Dr. Don at 888-488-4854. His favorite thing to discuss is implementation of Rocket Math.
** 13. (c) have a top student designated who practices alone. Not explicitly stated anywhere in our directions but monitoring is critical, so the teacher cannot be anyone’s partner or else there will often be no monitoring of whether students are practicing the right way. A group of three is asking for fun and games so don’t do that. Your top student probably knows how to study best of all, so that’s who goes without a partner when that’s needed. Don’t have a student sit quietly and waste this time.