How to use StrADDegy?

StrADDegy is a digital toolkit for teachers to help children build Facts That Last. The intended progression for the introduction of a strategy is to move from learning opportunities that:

Invite children to construct the underlying concepts and number relationships to which strategies are mapped
Visit and revisit a bank of learning experiences that encourage children to internalize the patterns and relationships to ultimately trust that they are generalizable to a range of contexts and scenarios.
Provide consolidation and practice so that children own the facts to a point of mastery.

While this is the suggested sequence, only the classroom teacher can know his/her students well enough to make the best decisions about what to use in StrADDegy and when. With this in mind, StrADDegy was designed to be used flexibly in whole-group, or small-group settings or at learning stations. Where we might suggest a learning experience be used as a whole-group routine, a teacher could just as logically determine it works better in his/her class as a small-group guided session or as a learning station.

Whether teachers intend to be guided by our suggested learning cadence or create their own, it is important to be aware that we have situated our content according to the instructional intent described above (construct, trust, own).

Step 1. Select a StrADDegy. We have chosen the following strategy sequence in response to the complexity of the big ideas that underpin each strategy and the momentum of confidence that can be built by mastering each fact set. For instance, the Count-ons are a relatively easy set of facts to master and it is incredibly empowering for children to know that they can “own” 57 facts, almost half of the full 121 facts, in a short span of time. For a variety of reasons, teachers may choose to introduce their own sequence (personal preference, student needs, curriculum expectations etc…). Please feel free to do so, but be aware of the conceptual prerequisites for each strategy

Assumptions:

Only through a variety of contexts and through a variety of visual tools and manipulatives will children be able to attach operations to situational contexts and model these operations symbolically.
Teachers will modify the decomposition activities introduced in the Number Bonds to 10 strategy to allow children to become proficient with all number bonds for all numbers from 1 to 10.
Students will continue to be introduced to subitizing activities as part of their core programming.
While the commutative property is not introduced as a separate strategy, teachers will use the many opportunities in StrADDegy to explore it explicitly.
Teachers will make strong connections where appropriate to the progressive introduction to written numbers and expressions to 20 throughout.
Teachers will use the opportunities in the resource to make the continuous connection to the relationship between addition and subtraction and use the instructional prompts to encourage children to develop and share their subtraction strategies.
Teachers will not impose the use of a strategy. If a child is not comfortable with one strategy, support another. The goal is to find what works for the individual.
The ultimately goal is to have the reliance on strategies give way to automaticity, realizing that the pace of that transition will be different for all students.