Mr. Lillie Upper Elementary Most parents would say that getting good grades in elementary school math is very important. However, I think that there is something much more important than getting good grades in elementary school math – this is that students develop a deep understanding and mastery of the key mathematical concepts that are needed for success in high school and university math. When planning the math curriculum, quizzes and tests, I could make them very easy, which would result in students getting very high grades. It would seem on the surface that students were doing very well in math, but their root knowledge would be very weak and shallow. Instead of making the curriculum, quizzes and tests easy, I design them to be very challenging. Students progress from simple basic concepts to very well advanced concepts. When writing quizzes and tests, I include many challenging variations of important concepts in order to try to discover any weaknesses in students’ understanding. I also include difficult problems and unfamiliar situations to develop students’ problem-solving ability, resilience, creativity and confidence. As a result of the curriculum, quizzes and tests being so challenging at Wheatley, students will inevitably make mistakes and will sometimes get lower grades than they or their parents would like. Making mistakes is a vital part of learning though. I want students to make as many mistakes as they need to until they have mastered the concepts being learned. The more mistakes they make and learn from while they are in elementary school, the less mistakes students will make in high school and university. Students may not always get very high grades in math here, but when they go to high school, Wheatley graduates consistently have outstanding achievement in math because of the deep understanding they developed while at Wheatley.
Wheatley School Montessori and International Baccalaureate school