Dear EVCS Family,

Every day, within our walls and out in our community, our kids are learning to do so much! And whether your child is in Pre-K or in 5th grade – or anywhere in between – one thing they’re doing is exploring numbers and mathematical concepts each and every day. As adults, we work with math so often we often don’t even realize it: From paying the bills to modifying a recipe, from figuring out whether a new chair will fit in the room to figuring out the change at the deli, we all are mathematicians. So often I hear from parents, though, that they don’t understand how we are teaching math – that it’s not how they learned math as children. And it’s true! It’s certainly not how I learned math growing up, but our kids are thinking flexibly about numbers in ways high above what was expected of us years ago. The work is messier now than it once was – we value conceptual understanding of big ideas over computational fluency, and we prefer incorrect answers with high-level thinking over rote completion of an algorithm. You may not hear our teachers instructing students to “carry the one” – but it’s rich and meaningful work happening across our school.

Just today I visited one of our second grade classrooms. Students were working in pairs to solve addition and subtraction problems. These kids could talk about their mathematical thinking in such an impressive way. But their work didn’t look anything like how I learned to solve problems! I’d like to share these problems and solutions with you to highlight the sort of ways our kids are thinking about math and how it might not be the way you feel prepared to help support your kids. In a few days we’ll be having a workshop for parents and kids to talk about just that!
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