A hidden treasure is the Common Core of State Standards Math Coherence Map. It is an interactive flow chart that shows connections between the various standards.
- If you are teaching math, you can see the connections between what you are teaching, what was taught previously, and how you are preparing students for their future math education.
- If you are a special education teacher, you can see the progression of prerequisite skills. If you write IEP objectives for grade level standards, you can address the prerequisite standards and progress made through these prerequisites can show progress towards mastery of the IEP objectives.
In this post, I show the progression from 1st grade standard on the = sign and 2nd grade standard of repeated addition all the way to interpreting slope in high school math.
After clicking “Get Started” you will narrow your focus to the grade, the cluster, and then the math domain.
The flow chart shows connections between a selected standard and others, including prerequisites. In this case 8.F.B.4 – 8th grade content that is a prerequisite for the high school math work. Click on the 8.F.B.4 standard and it pops up (below right).
In turn, the 8th grade standard is connected to a 7th grade prerequisite regarding ratios and proportions.
Notice that the 7th grade standard, 7.RP.A.2, appears to be a dead end (bottom left). I picked up the path by clicking on Grade seen at the top left of the screenshot and made my back to that standard and the connections to prerequisites appeared. (Same happened in 3rd grade shown further down in this post.)
The path continues from ratio and proportions in 7th grade to unit rate in 6th grade, multiplication word problems and multiplication in elementary school.
I want to emphasize that students are working on unit rate and slope problems in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL! 3.OA.A.1 below addresses groups of objects model for multiplication and 4.OA.A.2 addresses word problems involving multiplication.
I was recently working with a student entering middle school on multiplication word problems. To unpack the word problems and the concept of multiplication in context, I had her draw (photo below) groups and groups of objects to help her identify the unit rate (although we don’t use that term yet). This work will impact her math education through the high school math and even into college (slope has been a common gap for the college students in the math courses I taught at various colleges and universities).
This approach I used with the student could be used for high school students, especially those with special needs.