5th Grade Math Recap for Parents and Students

Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

This too shall pass.

Eventually, students will return to school. A new normal will emerge and we will all look back on our toilet paper hoarding days and chuckle.

But will your child know what s/he needs to know to be successful next year? What gaps exist between what your child currently knows and what will be taught in the following grade?

While everyone is talking about homeschooling, virtual learning, and other digital programs to fill in the gaps, many parents might not be very comfortable with the intricacies of 5th grade mathematics. It's been a long time since they've been asked to convert an improper fraction to a mixed number or to separate prime and composite numbers.

The suspension of traditional school in the US, at least for what will most likely be the remainder of the 2020 school year, does not need to be the end of learning. If you have a 5th grader, you are in luck.

I have a YouTube channel I started several years ago called Five Minute Math. My purpose was to create tons and tons of tiny videos, each five minutes or less, that explore one component of a grade level's math expectations.

I have the entirety of 5th grade math on a playlist (42 videos). What I'm proposing is a simple partnership between you, me, and your 5th grade student.

Starting next Monday (March 23, 2020), I'll create one blog post a day, Monday through Thursday, for the next three weeks. Each of the 12 blog posts will contain links to a few of my 5th grade math videos and three related practice problems from a released STAAR test (State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness).

The deal is simple. If you and/or your student will watch two, sometimes three, videos a day to cover 5th grade math concepts and work on three practice problems from a release STAAR test, we can get through the entire 5th grade math curriculum in three weeks. The videos are designed both for parents and for students and each are five minutes or less.

Each night (8:00 pm CST) that I post one of the 12 daily tasks, I'll live stream from my YouTube channel to go over the answers from that days' practice problems. I'll explain the correct answers, show why the incorrect answer choices are wrong, and answer any questions that you might have in the chat. Those videos will then be available on my channel if you can't watch them live.

The schedule of the videos and practice problems can be viewed below.

Together we can keep learning going - at least for 5th grade math!