Background: New York State participated in a national Consortium Incentive Grant (CIG) that developed a summer math curriculum for use in both summer school and in-home instructional settings. This Math Consortium built the curriculum to focus on specific math skills to maintain and improve students’ skills and confidence in math during the short summer programs. Texas and its Education Service Center, Region 20’s Project Smart team provided the lead in curriculum development.
The original summer school curriculum used ELA instruction to support the math for 3 ½ hours of instruction, three days a week for six weeks. The in-home curriculum focused on the core ELA and math elements for two hours of instruction per week. During multiple years of use, many instructors preferred to separate the math and ELA components in order to focus ELA instruction to support student needs.
Alignment to the New York State Next Generation Learning Standards: Summer 2015 was the last year of the Math Consortium, but some METS continued using parts of that last summer curriculum known as “Math Matters.” For Summer 2019, the Statewide Support Team/Technical Assistance & Support Center (SST/TASC) of the New York State Migrant Education Program (NYS-MEP) realigned the Math Matters curriculum to the New York State Next Generation Mathematics Learning Standards.
Streamlined: The SST/TASC selected four math activities from the entire Math MATTERS curriculum that seem to provide the greatest practice of the focus math skills for in-home instruction. Students at different skill levels can participate together while using their own, icon- and color-coded problems. The Educator Guide provides guidance as to how these activities can be expanded for use in a summer school setting.
Goal: The primary goal of the Summer Math curriculum is to maintain key math skills from the grade completed in June. The secondary goal is for Educators to identify and teach to gaps in student learning. It is summer, so most of the practice activities are embedded in a game structure.
Grade Student Complete in June: The content of each summer grade band is based on the grade that the student completed in June. Students who completed Grades 4 would use the student packets for grades 3-4 (whale icon).