Let's Talk About...Sprinkle Standards! by Sabrina Blake

Let's Talk About... Sprinkle Standards! 

While I wish we were talking about doughnuts, ice cream, or cupcakes, we are talking about a different kind of sprinkle: The Sprinkle Standard!  

With testing season upon us, I thought I'd address the elephant in the room.  In math, the SBAC test covers all of your grade level material, yet our adopted curriculum is a year-long program in which one or more modules are set to be taught too late for the test.  What can be done about this?  Read on for a solution.    

I 100% believe that the true purpose of teaching our standards is to lay a solid mathematics foundation and prepare the students for subsequent years of learning.  However, the reality is that test scores are kind of a big deal in our district.  Our Eureka curriculum has many positives to it, but in my opinion, the continued instruction of this year's standards all the way until the end of the year is not one of them.  How are my students supposed to feel prepared and confident with material that they will see on the test that I haven't taught yet?  Will they feel like I betrayed them somehow by sending them into that test unprepared?  I can't have that on my conscience.  So, how do you get those standards taught  before testing in a realistic manner?  Enter the Sprinkle Standards!  

"Winning is the science of being totally prepared." -George Allen

With a little backwards planning, you can sprinkle those last few standards to be taught throughout your school year and BINGO!  Your students are prepared for the SBAC! 

You'll want to go through your pacing guide and find out what is taught from about Mid-March until the end of the year.  For most grade levels 3-8, it was mostly the strands of Measurement & Data and Geometry, with some grade levels having some other stuff as well.  Click the Eureka resources button on the District Symbaloo, go to your grade level and check out the resources that are there for those standards/modules.  (If you aren't sure what this looks like, see the pictures at the bottom of the post.)  You could assign your students Khan Academy videos and practice from those standards- use as work in the computer lab or using a flipped classroom model.  The same can be done with Zearn or LearnZillion.  In grades 6-8, part of the resources shown are MARS tasks, created to be performance tasks.  But why not use them as group practice after a couple mini-lessons, or use as a whole-group activity after a mini-lesson.  These MARS tasks aren't listed as resources for grades 3-5, but I found them for you!  Click here for GRADE 3, GRADE 4, or GRADE 5.  

Here are a few other suggestions on how to sprinkle those standards in.  I love to bring in stuff that is themed to the different holidays throughout the year, or seasons if you'd prefer.  In 5th grade, I have to teach Volume and Coordinate Graphing/Geometry at the end of the year.  In mid-October, I did a quick mini-lesson on graphing in the coordinate plane.  Guess what we did at Halloween time?  And again at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day?  We had a fun centers day each time and Coordinate Graphing was one of those centers.  Other centers may be my other Geometry standards or Volume, as well as review standards my students need extra practice on.  By the time we review for the SBAC, my students are very familiar with the concepts.   Where can you find the time to squeeze in Centers?  Either teach your Eureka lesson in a guided math format (see my previous posts on that- the three-part series on Intervention) and use some of the student work time as acceleration instead of intervention.  Or, maybe skip one day's Fluency and Application to substitute in the mini-lesson needed to complete some independent practice sheets at home with the support of a Khan Academy video.  

There are many ways to make it work, and the important part would just be to give it a try!  Now is the perfect time of year to start looking ahead to the next school year and figuring some of this out.   As always, if you have comments, please leave them below.  If you have questions, please don't hesitate to reach out, my email is at the bottom and I'm happy to help!  I'd love to be a part of your math journey.

Mathematically yours,

Sabrina Blake

OMSD Symbaloo Page- Look for Eureka Resources

Select your Grade Level

Look to the far right to see the Khan Academy videos and 3-Act Tasks for 5th grade or MARS Tasks for 6-8