John Wallace Middle School’s Ninja to the Stars Bulletin Board
Ms. Laura Harvey, a 5th grade teacher at John Wallace Middle School in Newington Public Schools in Connecticut, created a Ninja to the Stars bulletin board to help encourage her students to become math fact fluent with Reflex. As students saw themselves and their fellow students move up the board, her students now ask if they can “check their ninja.”
Ms. Harvey’s students “have made progress in both their math facts and confidence in the classroom.” Her students are “finishing up our algebraic connections unit and starting fractions, and they are making comments to me such as, ‘Now I get why you need to know your math facts,’ and, ‘Knowing everything from Reflex has made this a lot easier.'”
“My first student to hit 100% fluency had been using a multiplication chart in math class prior to Reflex. However, her dyslexia did not make the multiplication chart a very user friendly tool at times. She no longer needs the chart and that has boosted her confidence, and made her computation more automatic and accurate. In addition, she still shows a love for Reflex and has been a wonderful peer role model for the other students who are on their way to hitting 100% fluency.”
She adds, “Reflex continues to help my students grow in regard to learning their math facts in a way that is highly engaging for 21st century learners. With all of my students so far I have seen their confidence grow when their tree gets a little bigger, they hit a new high score, or they earn more points for mastering facts.”
Pine Ridge Reservation School’s Ninja to the Stars Bulletin Board
A teacher at a school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota created a math fact fluency bulletin board for all the classes at her school. “The students LOVE the board. It is in a main hallway that everyone walks by to get to their classrooms and the cafeteria, so they see it a lot. It’s been up for a month now and still students are always stopping and talking about their class, what percentage they have reached and how they are trying to make it to the top. It’s also been fun for students to see how other classes are doing. I update the board on Fridays after school is out, so the students come back on Monday excited to see how much their Ninja has jumped!”
She says that the majority of students in her class arrived already two years behind in math, and Reflex has really helped to change that. “Not only have I watched students blossom into confident, math-loving scholars, but the testing data from our class was phenomenal. In MAP testing, 30% of my students group upwards of 25 points in math (yearly growth is normally 16 points for our grade level). All students grew at least a year. Two students grew two whole years.”