Math Spiral Review

In my teaching career, I figured out very quickly that I needed to provide my students with continual spiral review of concepts in order for them to truly learn them. For most of my teaching years, I have taught First Grade (17 out of 20 years).

First Grade is full of discovery for children. Many of them are seeing things for the first time at school. In Math, I always use lots of hands-on activities and manipulatives to go along with learning to write math ideas and answers on paper.

Throughout the years, I discovered that the math series books that we used did not do an adequate job of spiral reviewing the concepts. Often, there would be some spiral review papers here and there, but I always felt like they needed a quick review almost daily.

I developed a daily math journal for my students that would provide a short daily practice of skills we had learned. It starts with easier concepts and gets more challenging as the year goes on and they learn more skills. I was recovering from Lyme Disease treatment one summer and was on the couch most of the month of July, so I had a lot of time to rearrange the problems and develop an order that matched our math series.

I divided the journal into four parts- one for each of our 9 week grading periods. I used these for five years until I moved to Second Grade. I'm now teaching Third Grade. I miss these Journals! I've been working on one for Third Grade. Hopefully, it will get done this year. I want it to be helpful for the students and worth the time it takes them to complete the problems each day, so it is going slow as I figure out how I want it.

Anyway, if you are looking for an easy way to incorporate a spiral review in your First Grade math class, here are the links to my Math Journals.