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Overview of Connected Math
Connected Math is a program for middle school and covers grades 6-8. There are eight books in each grade level covering all of the five state math goals. The program focuses on discovery-based learning and uses higher level critical thinking problems in real life scenarios to cover the topics. Definitions are student created and the students, with teacher guidance, develop algorithms. The homework problems tend to be very difficult for students for two reasons. First they are often in story problem format and secondly, there is a large amount of reading involved.
Connected Math pushes for an understanding of the concepts through a discovery approach. Students are often asked to form conjectures and justify their answers. Most parents were not taught with this methodology. Parents tend to resort to showing the student how they were taught math when they went to school. This is usually a procedural process where the student is told to follow a series of steps to get an answer. This can be detrimental to the discovery approach. The discovery approach focuses on students seeing patterns in math and developing their own processes for how to reach solutions. It is important for parents to assist their children with more than procedural assistance. Deeper understanding can be reached with coaching and guiding students.
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