Today, students are bringing home their first "speedway" assessment pages. For homework tonight they are filling in or fixing their addition 5-minute assessment. How do we do these assessments in our classroom?
The upper Montessori students do a daily, quick math fact assessment. We do a one minute "speedway" assessment and a weekly five-minute timed test. This plan was developed based on a plea from middle and high school math teachers to make sure that students knew their facts! Our math speedway is a three or four day per week one-minute test with 10 problems. It covers basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Ideally, students move forward each time they take their speedway test. The five minute timed test requires students to move through 100 basic math facts with 100% accuracy. Students do addition and subtraction in the beginning of the year each year as a baseline assessment but the main focus is multiplication and division. For those students that pass out of division we have other five-minute challenges! Students compete against their own score each week. The goal is steady progress in memorizing the facts.
These assessments can be fun and the students look forward to them (That is also why everyone starts at zero for the addition speedway.) Most importantly, they take very little time each week out of the school day but the results are seen in our daily math lessons as well as simple fact recall.
What do these assessments tell you at home? What math facts students have mastered and where they struggle. If your son or daughter did great on this week's addition five-minute test, that is great! Next week we'll be doing a subtraction five-minute assessment. Watch for these to come home to see how students are doing on their facts. Look for speedways that are 100% correct. When a speedway test comes home with errors, this is a fact family to study and practice at home.
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