How I run Math RTI

Do you teach math? At my school we use tons of screeners for reading, but math was sort of left up to us. We know we are supposed to use the same RTI model with math, but with no screener, how can we? 

I thought I'd take a few minutes and share with you how I've worked around this screening issue. I knew my students were struggling with my grade level content, but I had no idea why. 

When I started looking into Common Core I noticed that the elementary grades were split into domains; adding, subtracting, fractions, etc. And depending on if you are looking up grade levels (K to 5) or down the grade levels (5 to K) the standards in these domains just build on each other. If a kindergarten student is adding to 10, 1st grade is adding to 20, 2nd grade within 100. And, well, you get the idea. They just expect more as the students go to the next grade. 

So now I had the knowledge of the standards, but how would that help? Honestly it didn't. At first I started printing common core worksheets from commoncoresheets and mathworksheetsland so I could get an idea of what lower level math was hard for them. That became super time consuming and hard to manage.

I then created example problems for each of the standards for all of the grade levels K to 5 (yes it was a lot of work). I only wanted a couple just to see if that was where they were getting stuck. And I needed them organized in a way that I could pull them back out over and over again. I also needed a way to organize and keep track of the data otherwise assessing the students was a waste of both out times. 

It has worked out great. I use them 2 different ways. I can use them to get an idea for my math workshop groups. 4th grade subtraction is going to be tough for you if you are still struggling with  2nd grade subtraction. That means I will initially place you in one of my guided math groups that slows down and does some review first. 

But, I mainly use them for intervention time. My school has dedicated RTI time (we call it WIN- What I Need). And two days a week we are expected to work on math intervention. These quick and easy assessments, along with the sheets I created to track the assessments makes creating intervention groups a piece of cake. It lets me know exactly what the students need to work on to get them back to grade level... or beyond! 

Feel free to use my worksheet idea to get an idea of where your students are at, or I've already done it for you and you can check them out here: Math RTI!