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Mathematics

 

Student Enrollment

Balanced Instruction Model

VUSD’s effective math classrooms engage students through differentiated, instructional strategies that accommodate diverse learners' ways of interacting, understanding, and expressing their skills. Students problem solve to develop conceptual understanding as well as procedural skills. The balanced approach allows our students to make deep connections and apply mathematics to the world around them.

Tier-1 Embedded Practices

  • Students are recognized and valued in a safe environment through the implementation of essential routines and procedures
  • Students demonstrate learning in standards-based experiences that foster communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking through researched-based instructional strategies and intentional engagement structures
  • Students develop and embrace a growth mindset through reflection and opportunities to show growth in a supportive learning environment
  • Students have multiple opportunities to read, write, listen, and speak in all content areas

Standards of Mathematical Practice

  • Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
  • Reason abstractly and quantitatively
  • Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
  • Model with mathematics
  • Use appropriate tools strategically
  • Attend to precision
  • Look for and make use of structure
  • Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

 

Grades TK-12

Critical Thinking

  • Students set goals, take risks, and overcome challenges
  • Students work collaboratively to explain and justify their thinking
  • Students engage in writing to justify their thinking
  • Students apply their learning to new context and situations
  • Students make mathematical connections to the world around them

Procedural Skills and Fluency

  • Students demonstrate fluency by applying strategies and procedures accurately
  • Students compute with numbers accurately, efficiently, and flexibly
  • Students select, adapt, and apply strategies to problems

Core Knowledge and Skills

  • Students notice and wonder about mathematics to develop authentic connections
  • Students develop mathematic connections and demonstrate understanding with the use of manipulatives, pictures, graphs, tables, numbers, and symbols
  • Students solve problems with the use of models and explanations
  • Students communicate ideas with academic language to develop conceptual understanding and deepen connections