February 7, 2016

Greetings,

This week's edition is all about math, with a look at the new curriculum we are implementing to teach this important subject, and a report on Swain's participation in yesterday's regional Mathcounts competition.

Introducing Singapore Math: 
A Deeper Understanding of Numbers    
    and Math Concepts
by Grace Diggs, Math Coordinator

We are very excited to share news with you about curricular changes in mathematics that will be in place for the 2016-2017 school year.

As you may know, teachers and administrators at Swain undertook a review of the math curriculum, starting over a year ago. We visited other independent schools, researched a variety of programs, and considered the best practices available to provide the richest and most compre-hensive math curriculum available. It was very clear that the best and most well established program, as well as the best fit for Swain students in grades Kindergarten through fifth grade, is the Singapore Math Curriculum.

Singapore Math is a methodology, begun in 1998 in the Singapore school system, that teaches a deep understanding of number sense, as well as the underlying concepts beneath the common methods for solving problems. Children are given the tools to master both the concepts and the operations, but with a deeper exploration and understanding of why and how numbers relate. Since its tremendous success in Singapore, the program has been implemented in many countries, including a number of schools in the United States.

The sequence of topics in Singapore Math has been carefully constructed based upon child development theory, and teaches children appropriately, as they are developmentally ready. The goal is for children to perform well because they understand the material on a deeper level; they are not just focused on getting the correct answer. 

This approach will serve all our students well, allowing them to take the tools they learn in K-5 through Singapore Math and apply them later in Pre-Algebra, Algebra and beyond. The transition will be smooth, as the concepts and methods learned become tools in higher level courses.

At Swain, teachers have already spent a day of professional development devoted to learning how to implement Singapore Math for our classes. All math teachers in Prekindergarten through eighth grade participated, so that we will all share the same approaches with our students.

Much excitement and enthusiasm has already spread into our teaching, and we are gradually incorporating some Singapore Math into our classes this year. We are already seeing that Singapore Math deepens students' understanding of numbers, builds a stronger knowledge base, and unifies our pedagogy. A unified continuum of curriculum will benefit the children as well.

Our next day of professional development, on Thursday, March 24, will again be devoted to Singapore Math, concen-trating on model drawing. This is the method used for solving word problems, and teaches students to create a chart or map for solving complex and varied word problems. We have seen how successfully this approach works at other schools, so we are excited to bring this to our students.

As the year progresses, we will share further news of this exciting new initiative while teachers are actively participating in additional professional development activities. 

You may want to check out these articles for additional information:
We're excited to share these impressive results!
 
Mathcounts is an annual competition among 26 area middle schools, and includes both team and individual events. At yesterday's competition, Swain's School Team emerged with a 7th place finish, moving up from 11th place last year, and 14th place the year before. Our highest ranking individual was Shyam Patel '16 who ranked #25 in a field of over 200 competitors.

The road to yesterday's event began in mid-January, when all students in grades 7 and 8 took the Mathcounts test. This was the first phase in a mathematical olympiad, which consists of 30 problems to be completed in 40 minutes. These problems require short answers. Problem-solving is highlighted in the test, and the problems encourage students to look at familiar problems in new ways.

Yesterday's half-day competition began with several sets of questions. Some of those rounds were for every member of the group, while the last round is for the School Team members only. The individual and team rounds are held first. The highly-anticipated event of the day is the Countdown, where the top 16 scorers of the day compete live in front of the audience to complete math problems in 45 seconds or less.
 

These Swain students participated at Mathcounts yesterday: School Team members Jack Kehoe, Ben Kraft, Shyam Patel and Noel Yacoub (all eighth grade) and individual competitors Will Bingham (eighth grade) and seventh graders Ali Ahmed, Aisha Durrani, Graham Gross and Luke Shingles. They are coached by middle school math teachers Grace Diggs and Lauren Kreitz.

Congratulations to our "Math-letes"!


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The Swain School
1100 South 24th Street
Allentown, Pennsylvania 18103