How to Use BJU Press in Your Math Classroom
At BJU Press we believe you are the key to your students’ success in your classroom. And we’re cheering you on. That’s why we have created tools within our math program to support you every step of the way. Here are some ways you can use BJU Press math program materials to help you in your math classroom.
Course Planning
Your teacher edition provides suggested strategies to use for successful course and daily lesson planning. At the front of the teacher edition, you can find the Lesson Plan Overview that outlines the entire course. An editable version of these pages is available for free on Teacher Tools Online. You have complete freedom to customize lessons, in order and in execution, based on the needs of your students.
You will notice that BJU Press uses a spiralized approach to teaching math—topics such as addition and fractions may be covered in multiple chapters throughout the book, but each time a topic is revisited, more depth is added. For example, in Math 3, addition and subtraction are covered in three different chapters. The first chapter deals with basic addition and subtraction facts. When it is covered again in chapter 3, students will apply their understanding to 2- and 3-digit numbers. By the end of chapter 5, students are expected to be able to add and subtract 4-and 5-digit numbers. This same spiralized approach extends across grade levels as well as from lesson to lesson.
Chapter Planning
Chapter overview pages are a great first resource as you begin a chapter. The chart on the first page gives a good idea of the skills you will need to cover as you progress through the chapter. Also, take special note of the materials list at the bottom of that page. Grabbing everything from the list and prepping the materials for each individual lesson at the beginning can save you a lot of time. You will use these materials throughout the chapter. The Chapter Information section on the second page gives information to help focus your teaching.
Lesson Planning
Your teacher edition also provides you with a guideline for individual lesson planning. It is not intended to be a script because you understand your student’s needs best. We encourage you to customize your instruction to meet those needs.
Review
Each lesson guide starts out with a lesson objectives list, a materials list, and then a Practice and Review section. Review is a critical part of teaching math. It’s important to review previously taught material so your students don’t forget it. However, the review listed in the lesson guide is just a suggestion—you’ll want to pay attention to the needs of your students and work on what they need to work on. We do encourage you to include math fact reviews as part of this review time because it is important for students to master math facts and gain automaticity. To make learning math facts fun, you can use the review game suggestions on Teacher Tools Online.
Lesson Focus
After you’ve completed your review, you can move on to your lesson focus, the main concept you want your students to grasp during the lesson. The teacher edition provides you with different teaching strategies and practice problems to use during your lesson. But remember, you don’t have to do everything. You can pick and choose based on the needs of your students and the time constraints that you’re under.
The teacher’s edition also shows you how to connect the lesson focus to biblical worldview themes. For example, Math 3 teaches students that math is a tool to help people accomplish the work God has given them to do. It also teaches that math is a limited tool—it doesn’t have all the answers. These biblical worldview themes, as well as others, will often be listed in the lesson objectives. Be on the lookout for these themes and plan time to explore them through class discussions.
More tools are available to help you teach new concepts to your students. The teacher’s visual packet includes classroom-sized math manipulatives. You can take time to model-solve math problems using these manipulatives while your students follow along with their own manipulatives. Using the manipulatives helps build your students’ math understanding and prepares them to grasp more complex math concepts in their future math studies.
Teacher Tools Online includes PowerPoint files and other multimedia files to enhance your lessons. Check out the videos that bring the chapter-themed stories to life, and try to include them in your lessons. These stories provide great opportunities for biblical worldview shaping and help students connect math concepts to authentic learning situations.
Guided and Independent Practice
The student worktext provides students with an opportunity to practice the concepts you’ve taught them. We recommend that you use the front of the worktext page for guided practice during your math lesson. Work through the problems together as a class or have the students solve and then self-grade them during class.
The back page of the student worktext page is designed to be done independently. You don’t have to assign the entire page—if your students did well with the guided practice problems, you may only want to assign the even or odd-numbered problems for students to do on their own. Assigning the entire review section keeps prior learning fresh in your students’ minds.
Assigning Homework
In addition to the worktext pages, every lesson also has corresponding pages in the Math Reviews worktext (these come in printed form for grades 1–4 and are available digitally on Teacher Tools Online for grades 5 and 6). The front page reviews concepts taught during the day’s lesson, and the back page reviews previously taught material. Many teachers assign these pages for students to do at home and assign a grade for the front page.
You may also want students to take advantage of AfterSchoolHelp.com to help them gain math fact mastery and automaticity.
Assessing Progress
Two review lessons are scheduled at the end of each chapter. The first review lesson is a chapter review that focuses on reviewing the concepts taught in the chapter to prepare students for the chapter test. The second review lesson is a cumulative review that focuses on reviewing previously taught material. This review is formatted like a standardized test, so students will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with that unique format.
Every chapter includes a chapter test. Printed test packets and answer keys are available from BJU Press.
Many teachers like to do the chapter review before administering the chapter test on the following day. Some teachers do both reviews before the chapter test. Others have even found it helpful to do the cumulative review the same day as the chapter test since students can usually finish the test well before the end of the class period.
We are excited to partner with you in your math classroom, and we hope this overview has been helpful as you prepare to teach with BJU Press materials. If you would like to see BJU Press materials in action in a first-grade classroom, you may want to check out the Professional Development course, Classroom in Focus: 1st Grade Math.
Posted June 14, 2021.