First Week of Investigations Is In the Books!!!

Our county adopted the Envision mathematics series about 3 years ago with the hopes that we would move into Investigations by this point. Too bad that we are STILL working with Envision!!!! And here's a shocker... it sucks! I am not a great mathematician by any means, but I have NEVER had such low test scores as I have had with Envision. The questioning is weird and the overall approach doesn't match with the way kids think.

We got new instructional specialists this school year (who are AMAZING!) who came and met with our 3-5 teachers back in September and suggested that we make a move to doing only Investigations. No other school in our county is doing this. We had always been told to use 2 of the units and the rest was covered in Envision. We have been creating our curriculum map to plan out the rest of the year, gathering countless manipulatives to construct our math toolkits, and copying games and flashcards.

Well our planning and hard work is paying off! This week was our first full week of Investigations and while it is hard work and a different way of thinking and teaching math, my kids love it! They call our math block "fun math" now! I see their little lightbulbs going off everyday. I will keep you posted on what happens as we move through the other units, but for now, its great and we love "fun math"!!!!!