Saturday, May 4, 2013

Reflex Math Makes a Difference to At-Risk Student

I am anxiously waiting for my student JS to hit the 100% fluency milestone.  Here is almost there.

A Grade 7 student, JS recently arrived from India and was immediately placed in my Grade 6/7 class.  He had no English, no way of understanding what was going on around him and a very weak understanding of math concepts and basic facts.  His situation is one faced regularly by students moving into our District and the support we can give them is limited by budget restraints and reductions in teacher numbers.  The challenge for me, as his classroom teacher is to engage, remediate, instruct and include all while teaching multiple grade levels and dealing with a multitude of other student needs and issues.

Reflex Math has given JS something that he can do and be very successful at.  He works on this at school and at home and has made huge gains in mastering his basic facts.  After assessment, I found that his starting fluency was 3% or 7 facts.  This supported my initial classroom assessment.  In the past twelve weeks he gained mastery of an additional 222 facts and his fluency rate is now at 99%.  He has three facts to go.  He has made the greatest achievement of all my students and is now more willing to attempt to involve himself in our regular math activities.  He is more confident, more involved and is attempting and completing work.  The reports I get from Reflex make monitoring his progress so much easier as well.  So, as I said.......waiting anxiously for him to hit 100%.