Great Minds

How do you teach math to students who are still learning English? 💭 🔢

The answer isn't to wait. It's to teach with strategies that help them access the content.

Our very own Stacy Fitzwater Domingo recently visited classrooms at San Tan Heights Elementary in Arizona, a school that's successfully promoting mathematical understanding among their multilingual students.

Here's a look at five tried-and-true strategies she observed:
🧡 Take an asset-based approach to instruction
🧡 Pre-teach common math vocabulary and sentence structures
🧡 Use consistent mathematical routines
🧡 Make word problems relatable and readable
🧡 Think beyond the standard algorithm

Read the full article here: https://ow.ly/N7c050Z6K9b

Hit the target! 🎯🃏 This card game was designed to build your students’ fluency with the four basic operations and the order of operations while exercising their mathematical reasoning skills. Access the full set of directions plus 14 other free card games here: https://greatminds.org/math/eurekamathsquared/card-games

What actually helps students understand what they read? 💭📚

Throughout May, Melissa and Lori dove into the big question above, sparking insightful conversations with Kelly Gallagher, Barbara Davidson, Daniel Willingham, and Luke Morin.

Across these discussions, a few key themes kept emerging:

• Knowledge matters for comprehension
• Text complexity depends on the reader, text, and task
• Students need support when texts get challenging
• Strong readers learn through experience with complex texts

Want to revisit these ideas or share them with your team?

Check out their Listening Guide that highlights key ideas from some of their best episodes on reading comprehension: https://ow.ly/Saob50Z5Bug

💙 Melissa & Lori Love Literacy

Have you tried these Great Minds features yet? We know your priority is your students and all the important work happening in your classroom. To help your day run as smoothly as possible, these features were created with you and your students in mind. 🧡💙

Engagement is the heartbeat of meaningful learning. It’s what turns a quiet classroom of students into a community of thinkers, problem solvers, and active collaborators. 🧡

In this blog we’ll define engagement that truly supports math learning, recognize why that matters, and explore a research-based framework that helps students move from simply paying attention to becoming authentically invested and cognitively engaged. https://ow.ly/cphO50Z18zJ

🎧 Tune into the latest Melissa & Lori Love Literacy podcast episode featuring Luke Morin.

The discussion centers on collective close reading, the limits of strategies alone, and how “lily pad” supports can help students move through challenging texts with growing independence.

💙 Apple: https://ow.ly/5AvG50YzIUJ
💙 Spotify: https://ow.ly/ulRN50YzIUK

Thinking about ways to create more authentic, powerful moments of student engagement in your math classroom? 💭 Watch this free webinar recording and add it to your toolkit for the new school year:

Climbing the Engagement Ladder in Math: From Passive Participation to Powerful Collaboration Discover what authentic, powerful student engagement looks like in the math classroom.

Numbers up! 🔢 This card game was designed to build your students’ fluency by finding an unknown total or part. Access the full set of directions plus 14 other free card games here: https://ow.ly/gK7U50YXKGx

We told you it was something good! 🤩🍕

This fifth-grade student from Pennsylvania began with a square and transformed it into something surprising. If you guessed a slice of pizza yesterday, you were correct!

As the school year comes to an end, there's still time to try this with your class or save it as a back-to-school resource. https://ow.ly/L3rg50YO9qt

Think back to one of your best days of teaching.💭 How did you know your students were learning?

Maybe you noticed their eyes light up, witnessed the joy on their faces, or maybe you even felt so good about that day’s lesson that you couldn’t wait to tell your colleagues. 🤩

Share below so we can come together to remember the why, the joy, and the meaning that comes with being a teacher every single day.