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Bedtime Math – We inspire kids to love math so they embrace and excel at it.

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Response: 'Writing in Math Class Is a Win-Win for Students & Teachers' - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo - Education Week Teacher

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Response: 'Writing in Math Class Is a Win-Win for Students & Teachers' - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo - Education Week Teacher

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Education Week - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo

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The new "question-of-the-week" is:
How do you integrate writing in math classes?

All teachers these days are supposed to be literacy teachers, including math educators. Yes, students need to read word problems to do math, but how do you integrate writing into mathematics instruction?

Today, Dr. Linda Dacey, Sandy Atkins, Andrea Clark, Mike Flynn, ReLeah Cossett Lent, and Shannon Jones share their responses. I also include reader comments. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Linda, Sandy, Andrea and Mike on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might find this related collection of resources helpful: The Best Resources For Writing In Math Class.

In addition, check out posts that have previously appeared here on Math Instruction.
Response From Dr. Linda Dacey
Dr. Linda Dacey has written numerous professional resources about teaching mathematics. She began her career teaching at the elementary level, taught preservice and inservice teachers for many years, and now writes and consults:
Writing in math class is a win-win for students and teachers. Students have the opportunity to organize, clarify, explain, and share their ideas. Teachers get access to what and how students think, gaining invaluable information they would not get otherwise. So, what are some ways we can engage our students in writing activities that support their learning of math? Start with quick writes that need not take more than 2-8 minutes and they don't need to be formally evaluated. When introducing a lesson, you might show students a picture, a pattern, or a and ask them to record what they notice, You might show them a graph with no labels, and have them record possible titles for it. At the end of a lesson, you might ask students to write a headline for what they learned or to identify a question they have. Suggest that students work with partners. They can brainstorm and write together or brainstorm and then spend time reviewing each other's work. Such reviews lead to greater clarity, more precise language, and give students the experience of critiquing the thinking of others. Offer open-ended problems, which have more than one answer and can be solved in more than one way. Students are much more interested in explaining their thinking in writing, when it is likely to differ from others. They learn to write for themselves, so they can remember their ideas, and are often eager to read what others have written. Encourage students to write about what and why, perhaps in a two-column format. Such writing helps students keep track of what they are doing and aware of why they are doing it. Writing in this note-like format also helps to prepare students for writing more formal justifications. Provide prompts that provoke, ones that engage studens in debate, while honing their reasoning skills. Writing a mathematical claim and arguing for that position is the essence of mathematical proof. Possible argument starters include: Is zero a number? Are all prime numbers odd? If you double the y-values in an equation, will the slope double as well? Use math journals or notebooks on a near daily basis. Students might use them for reflective writing at the end of a class meeting or to record all of their notes; what they notice and wonder about; their work, explanations, and justifications. Students often become attached to their journals and eagerly open them to record their thinking. Make connections to creative writing to capture students' interest. Students could write a dialogue between a sine graph and a cosine graph or write an advertisement for why the circle is the best shape. They could write a myth about the day numbers were discovered and how it changed the world or a two-voice poem about positive and negative numbers. What's most important is that writing in math class feels meaningful to students. If students only write so that we can evaluate their learning, they will not see writing as something that has personal meaning to them. However, if students are involved in engaging tasks, they are more eager to write about their ideas, because that thinking is important to them.
Response From Sandy Atkins
Sandy Atkins, owner and Executive Director of Creating AHAs, LLC, is author of Creating a Language-Rich Math Class and Creating Fraction and Decimal AHAs. Sandy is a popular conference speaker and a national and international K-8 math education consultant:
Writing is essential to helping students excel in math Language (oral and written) is important to help students understand and excel at mathematics. Students who write about math

access the math to be learned and connect key representations (concrete, pictorial, verbal, and symbolic);

open a window into their thinking and current understandings; and

engage in the mathematical practices of constructing viable arguments, critiquing the reasoning of others, and clarifying their own thinking.

Provide access and build connections

1. Conceptual translations give meaning to the symbols and build the language of word problems by connecting language and imagery to mathematical symbols. Many of us would read 1½ ÷ ½ as one and a half divided by one-half or 1½ ÷ 3 as one and a half divided by three. Very little imagery accompanies these symbolic translations. However, read 1½ ÷ ½ as, "How many halves in one and a half?" Translate 1½ ÷ 3 as, "One and a half separated into three equal groups" and the symbols come alive. Have students write conceptual translations as a component of "showing their work."

2. A split second after giving students a math problem hands are raised for help. Use writing to shift their focus from quickly solving the problem to first understanding the problem. After reading, students write questions they need answered to help them understand the problem. They show a partner the question, ask other pairs for help, or involve the class in finding answers to written questions.

3. Observe a classmate model a problem using concrete materials and record their process. For example, to model 64 ÷ 4 (sixty-four separated into 4 equal groups) using base 10 a student observed:

Made 64 using 6 tens and 4 ones.

Put one 10 in each group-4 groups.

Traded 2 tens for 20 ones.

Put 5 ones in each group then 1 more 1 in each group.

This process parallels finding partial quotients and long division.

1. Have students write to a student who was absent or students a grade or two below about the day's math concept. I find that their explanations are more detailed and include pictures when writing to students two grades below. After all, "they need the help."

2. Getting a variety of answers for the same problem is common. Instead of leading a discussion toward the correct answer, have students write about the answers it cannot be and why. Another option is to choose an incorrect answer and have students write about what that student did not understand or the mistake that was made. This increases the cognitive demand on students and requires them to critique the reasoning of others.

Critique reasoning and construct viable arguments

1. Listening to what classmates say and critiquing their thinking is an important mathematical practice. When disagreements occur, have students write questions to help classmates change their minds. We initially need to negotiate the difference between a question and a statement. However, I'm no longer surprised that at first the only question they think of is, "Would you please change your mind?"

2. When doing math, the defense of a solution should be the final goal. Instead of describing the process used, have students use persuasive writing (proof) to convince their peers that their solution is correct. A prompt I use is, "The answer is _____. I know because..."

Each of these techniques makes writing an invaluable component of excellence in math.

Response From Andrea Clark
Andrea Clark is a 5th grade teacher at a small, independent school in Austin, Texas. She has taught 2nd-5th grades at both private and public schools. She blogs about technology and teaching life at https://teachingwithmrsclark.wordpress.com, and she posts at edtech and books on Twitter @andrea_m_clark:
Writing in math hit me over the head at the NCTM Annual Meeting this past March. I went to the Elementary Mathematics Writing Task Force's session on writing and Zak Champagne's session on formative assessments back-to-back, and it all fell into place: Include writing in your formative assessments! I already do formative assessments at the end of each chapter. If I replaced these five-question quizzes with a more robust word problem, the students could write about it. So I tried it. My students wrote about 2-3 times a week with these formative assessments. They solved one word problem and wrote about their process. I read what they did and why they did it, and I learned whether or not they understand the concept. It took longer and required additional instruction, but I had a much better idea of their grasp of the concept through their writing. This was a good start, but I thought I could do more. This year, guided by Smokey and Elaine Daniels's book The Best Kept Teaching Secret, I want my students to write every day in math. Before they start solving a problem, they can write about what they know and their first steps. Once they solve a problem, they can write about the whole process and how they know their answer is correct. At the beginning of class, they can write about their homework: what they need help with and what they feel confident about. At the end of class, they can write about what they learned and what questions they have. Their summative assessments are going to have a written component so they can reflect on the unit as a whole: what they accomplished and what they are still thinking about. I'm keeping my writing-based formative assessments too. If you are wanting to include writing in your math class, do it! Your students will need modeling of what a good mathematical written response looks like, but once they get it, you will be amazed at the richness of their thinking and the depth of their reasoning. Response From Mike Flynn
Mike Flynn is the director of Mathematics Leadership Programs at Mount Holyoke College where he runs the Master of Arts in Mathematics Teaching program. He is also the author of Beyond Answers: Exploring Mathematical Practices with Young Children. He tweets at @MikeFlynn55:
Writing in mathematics classrooms can take many forms and serve a variety of purposes. One form that intrigues me lately is the use of contextualization as a strategy for sense-making. As teachers try to build students' conceptual understanding of abstract ideas, they can encourage students to create contexts that help them visualize elements like the relationships between values or the actions of operations. Creating real-life scenarios of abstract concepts can make the mathematics feel more intuitive and natural when done correctly. We can contextualize this situation by saying a school got a shipment of 371 iPads and they planned to give one to each of the 257 students in the class. In this scenario, we are trying to figure out how many iPads the school would have leftover after every student received an iPad. When we changed the 257 to 260, we altered the story by adding students to the school who were not supposed to be there. That means we gave away 3 extra iPads so we must add the 3 back to the 111. In essence, we are returning the extra iPads we gave away. In the above example, the story context helps students see the relationship between the values in the problem and structure of subtraction. In this case, we took away more than we were supposed to so we needed to add that back at the end. The context serves as a mechanism to help students understand that when you add an amount to the subtrahend (the amount being removed) in a subtraction situation, the difference will be smaller. As one of my former 2nd-graders said when exploring this idea, "When you take away more, you end up with less." Teachers can encourage students to write contexts to describe the mathematical concepts they are exploring as a way to help them deepen their understanding of abstract ideas. When students contextualize the mathematics, they provide a familiar frame of reference from which they can make sense these ideas. This form of writing can be very powerful in math class and can make a big difference in students' understanding.
Response From ReLeah Cossett Lent
A large high school math department was instructed to integrate writing into their math lessons but they were hesitant, explaining that mathematical "words" often take the form of numerical symbols, and sentences may look more like equations than prose. As a consultant hired by the district to support content-area teachers in incorporating reading and writing into their curriculum, I found this knowledgeable department less than enthusiastic about our collaboration-and I could hardly blame them. They had a lot to cover and little time in which to cover it. Our work together led to important understandings for me as well as for teachers willing to take the time to think about how writing and math might be more like bread and butter than oil and water. Writing is thinking-but that thinking doesn't always look the same. In math, students must organize and clarify information while planning for, reflecting on, and revisiting possible solutions to problems. Interestingly, these skills are exactly the ones required in writing. Often, the very process of writing clarifies thinking to such an extent that students experience a mathematical epiphany that brings everything together. Writing can become a critical tool for teachers to use in helping students unlock understandings. One of the best writing activities we developed together led to students' increased mathematical reasoning as well as collaborative problem solving. Students were placed in groups of four and every group was given a different, challenging word problem. Each student was provided with a copy of the group's problem and allowed time to read through it. Then, students were instructed to write about how they might begin to solve the problem until the timer went off (about 2 minutes). The teacher then said "pass," and students passed their writing to the student to their right. Students were given time to read and respond to their neighbor's post and continued to be pass and respond until each problem/solution ended up with the original writer. Students then read their original post and the three responses, discussed together how they might solve the problem, and then shared with the class their problem and possible solution. When we looked at the students' papers, we found that almost all of them began with some variation of "I don't really know how to solve this problem" with a few offering tentative suggestions. The final posts showed evolving mathematical reasoning and some had even solved the problem. This single activity demonstrated to all of us the power of writing, especially in math. In what other ways can students use writing as a tool for mathematical reasoning? Take a look at some ideas the teachers in this department are now incorporating writing into their lessons. Consider a student's strategy for solving 371 - 257 where they add 3 to the 257 to make 260. The new problem 371 - 260 is easier to solve mentally and results in a difference of 111. However, students who first try this strategy often struggle when deciding what to do with the 3 the added to the original problem. Should they add it to the 111 or subtract it? Here's where having students create contexts can be really powerful. Response From Shannon Jones

It is now commonplace on standardized math assessments for students to respond to prompts such as, "explain how you found your answer" or " explain how you used ______ to solve the problem." Writing can reveal understanding and misconceptions to guide our instruction, so how can we incorporate more writing in the math classroom? In the beginning the school year it helps to write sentence frames for your students when asking them to explain their thinking in writing. This helps set the tone for how you want math writing to be composed. It also helps to provide students with a word bank of key math terms that they should consider incorporating in their written response. As the school year progresses eliminate the word bank, instead encourage students to brainstorm which vocabulary terms should go in the word bank. Another strategy for adding writing into the math classroom is having students write their own math word problems.This is effective for evaluating a student's level of understanding about an operation. This writing strategy can reveal important math tactical issues, for example, if a student's division word problem has a larger divisor than dividend. Writing can also be utilized at the beginning and end of units to assess understanding and retention. A teacher can begin a unit with students writing everything they know about fractions and conclude the unit with the same prompt. Students writing about a strategy they are using to play an engaging math game is another effective way to integrate writing. Their words can reveal if they are being purposeful in their moves or just guessing. Following a writing prompt, student's names can be removed and students can evaluate their peer's written responses using a student or teacher created rubric. Student created rubrics often lead to improved written responses. Writing can also be integrated into math class as a closing activity where students can respond to prompts such as "What was easy today? What was difficult about today's lesson?" or "What do you understand now that you didn't understand at the beginning of class?"

Responses From Readers
ReLeah Cossett Lent is an international consultant and author of several books and articles on literacy and leadership. Her latest book, This is Disciplinary Literacy: Reading, Writing, Thinking and Doing. . .Content Area by Content Area (2016, Corwin), addresses learning in all disciplines:

Reflections on learning or confusion in learning logs

Interviews where students practice asking others questions to clarify their own understanding

Essays about how to use math in real world situations

Exit slips that ask students to explain, justify, describe, estimate or analyze

Silent, written discussions where students defend their process or answers

Blogs to create interdisciplinary connections

Shannon Jones is an 11-year elementary school educator. She has spent all of that time teaching math to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. She has worked as a Math Resource Teacher, a school wide math Professional Development Lead Teacher, and this past school year taught an advanced math course to 4th graders. She lives in Maryland with her husband, who is also an educator, and their two little girls:

every single day! Ss must explain their #math thinking with words, math symbols & expressions, & drawings.
-Nicole Fahey (@Nikcal88) October 12, 2017

Got another: explain how you solved the problem. Write as if you're explaining it to your little brother. Pushes tons of rigor!
-Piers Blyth (@PiersBlyth) October 12, 2017

Thanks to Linda, Sandy, Andrea, Mike, ReLeah and Shannon, and to readers, for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
Just a reminder-you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader. And, if you missed any of the highlights from the first six years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. They don't include ones from this current year, but you can find them by clicking on the "answers" category found in the sidebar. This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts Classroom Management Advice Race & Gender Challenges Implementing The Common Core Best Ways To Begin The School Year Best Ways To End The School Year Student Motivation & Social Emotional Learning Teaching Social Studies Project-Based Learning Using Tech In The Classroom Parent Engagement In Schools Teaching English Language Learners Student Assessment Brain-Based Learning Reading Instruction Writing Instruction Education Policy Issues Differentiating Instruction Math Instruction Science Instruction Advice For New Teachers Author Interviews Entering The Teaching Profession Administrator Leadership Teacher Leadership Relationships In Schools Professional Development Instructional Strategies
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.
Look for the next "question-of-the-week" in a few days..
Anyone whose question is selected for this weekly column can choose one free book from a number of education publishers.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It's titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributers to this column.

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Response: 'Writing in Math Class Is a Win-Win for Students & Teachers'

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The new "question-of-the-week" is: How do you integrate writing in math classes? All teachers these days are supposed to be literacy teachers, including math educators. Yes, students need to read word problems to do math, but how do you integrate writing into mathematics instruction?

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XtraMath - 10 minutes a day for math fact fluency

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XtraMath is a free program that helps students master addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts.

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The Common Core State Standards for math are pushing elementary educators to re-think how to teach math. How do you go beyond skills like adding and subtracting or the times tables to help kids develop a deep understanding of math concepts? Engineering activities are an ideal framework for meeting this challenge.

Using Your Math Skills is an Engineering Habit of Mind

Over the past year or so, the EiE Blog has been exploring " engineering habits of mind "-ways of thinking that kids develop as they engage in hands-on engineering activities. One habit that engineering promotes extremely well is the ability (and inclination!) to apply math knowledge to problem solving. Kids love to tinker and build stuff, and classroom engineering puts these natural inclinations right to work.

For an example, play the EiE Video Snippet "Is It Mission Ready?" below. This video gives you a peek inside a classroom where kids are designing, building, and testing parachutes. It's easy to see how this hands-on engineering challenge naturally calls on kids' math skills, exercises their problem-solving skills, and provides an authentic real-world context.

Making Meaning Out of Measurements

The teacher and students in this video are talking about two measurements they've made: the diameter of a parachute canopy and the length of its suspension lines. That's in line with the Common Core standards in the domain "Measurement and Data." For example, Grade 2 standards call for students to learn to measure using appropriate tools such as a ruler or yardstick.

A conventional lesson plan to meet this standard might call for kids to roam the classroom, measuring different objects. But making measurements for measurement's sake is an abstract process. Kids may not see why you'd ever want (or need) to measure your shoe, the whiteboard, or your desk.

Engineering Puts Math in a Real-World Context

On the other hand, making careful measurements is what real engineers do all the time!The kids in the video self-identify as aerospace engineers as they work on the unit A Long Way Down: Designing Parachutes. They've designed, built, and tested their parachutes with a clear goal in mind: to make a parachute that drops a payload as slowly and gently as possible.

The EiE storybook Paulo's Parachute Mission connects this classroom challenge to real-world events, like the NASA space missions that land scientific instruments on asteroids and planets. (The Mars Exploration Rovers are one well-known example.)

Measure, Calculate, Round Up, and More

Kids measure the diameter of the canopy and the length of its suspension lines several times as they improve their designs. Besides reinforcing measuring skills (see the EiE Video Snippet " Kids Should Measure a Lot " for more details), the parachute lesson gives kids lots of other opportunities to apply math knowledge-and meet Common Core standards along the way.

For example, to figure out whether their parachute is small enough to fit on board a spacecraft, kids calculate a "packing score." They use stopwatches to measure how long it takes their parachutes to fall. And they calculate "average drop speed" in feet per second-calling on their knowledge of decimal notation to report their results.

All of this happens befor e the scene you see in the Video Snippet " Average Drop Speed," where the teacher is working with her students to review the data sets they've compiled. As the students look for trends and provide explanations, they're meeting the standard CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.4.OA.C.5 within the Common Core domain "Operations and Algebraic Thinking"-and theydoing it in a way that makes math make sense.

Share your question about classroom engineering. We'll answer as many as we can!

Useful Link:

The Teaching Channel offers a short video that navigates you through Common Core math standards.
This blog post was first published on 3/31/2015. It has been updated and reviewed for accuracy. Engineering is Elementary is a project of the National Center for Technological Literacy at the Museum of Science, Boston.

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The Common Core State Standards for math are pushing elementary educators to re-think how to teach math. How do you go beyond skills like adding and subtracting or the times tables to help kids develop a deep understanding of math concepts? Engineering activities are an ideal framework for meeting this challenge.

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10 Useful Math Practice Apps for Elementary Students ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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10 Useful Math Practice Apps for Elementary Students ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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Looking for some good iPad apps to help elementary students with their Math? The list below features some of the most popular iPad apps in this category. These apps have been endorsed by a larger base of teachers and educators and are ideal for classroom inclusion. Using these apps, kids will get to practice and develop different mathematical skills through a variety of games, activities, and interactive lessons. Some of these apps also integrate speech functionalities to help students with sight problems.

From toddlers to grade school, for Children of all ages - Math Puppy is the perfect way to build up your math skills. Your child will be able to enjoy a constructive, supportive, interactive fun filled environment while mastering the arts of basic math.

2- My Math Flashcards

My Math Flash Card App is for mastering basic elementary math facts. Its an easy to use and customizable application to enable focused learning. Some of the salient features are: Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division Cards; Randomly generated Flash Cards; Customize to focus mastering a particular fact like Addition by 2 or subtracting by 2; and Simple sound effects to provide feedback.

3- MathBoard

MathBoard is a highly configurable math app appropriate for all school aged children. Beginning in kindergarten, with simple addition and subtraction problems, through elementary school where learning multiplication and division can be a real challenge. MathBoard will allow you to configure the app to best match the abilities of your individual child/student.

4- Motion Math

Feed your fish and play with numbers! Practice mental addition and subtraction with Motion Math: Hungry Fish, a delightful learning game that's fun for children and grownups.

5- Pizza Fractions

Geoboard is a tool for exploring a variety of mathematical topics introduced in the elementary and middle grades. Learners stretch bands around the pegs to form line segments and polygons and make discoveries about perimeter, area, angles, congruence, fractions, and more.
10- Chicken Coop Fraction Games

Improve your ability to add fractions as you choose the right set of rockets to fire Ernie into the nest. In this hilarious game there are fifty levels to complete and each one will help you get to grips with addition and multiplication of fractions.

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10 Useful Math Practice Apps for Elementary Students

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Looking for some good iPad apps to help elementary students with their Math? The list below features some of the most popular iPad apps in this category. These apps have been endorsed by a larger base of teachers and educators and are ideal for classroom inclusion.

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Fraction Mash – Noticing Tools – Teacher Hub

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Fraction Mash – Noticing Tools – Teacher Hub

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Create hilarious and dazzling photo mashups while exploring fraction concepts. Fractions have never been this fun - you may just want to Instagram your math homework!

Fraction Mash

Educators can inspire learners to explore and use mathematical concepts involving fractions as they make hilarious and complex photo mashups.

Ideal for elementary and middle school classrooms, Fraction Mash and accompanying curriculum activities address Common Core Math Standards (CCSM) by integrating content, mathematical practices, and delight.

Latest Lessons

Browse standards-aligned lesson plans to get started with Noticing Tools in your classroom.

Latest Tips

Find and share inspirations, how-tos, and ideas for using Noticing Tools. What did you make? What did you notice?

Get Inspired
See what other teachers and students are doing with Noticing Tools

Apple, the Apple logo, and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

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Create hilarious and dazzling photo mashups while exploring fraction concepts. Fractions have never been this fun - you may just want to Instagram your math homework! Educators can inspire learners to explore and use mathematical concepts involving fractions as they make hilarious and complex photo mashups.

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http://www.edutopia.org/blog/why-math-karim-ani

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Mix a little math into that bedtime story

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Mix a little math into that bedtime story

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For many families, reading is as much a part of summer as cookouts and camp. But as the weather warms, math is often banished along with mittens and sweaters. And that's a problem.

Studies of "summer math loss" find that the average kid forgets more than two months of math over the break. The numbers are worse for lower-income students, and those losses pile up, contributing to math achievement gaps.

Can education technology help put the brakes on summer backsliding? Early research on summer math-practice apps suggests they come up short. Maybe we'd have better luck using tech that changes how kids and their families relate to math all year round.

That's Laura Overdeck's vision. She's the founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation, which offers a free app to help families "make nightly math as common and beloved as the bedtime story."

The Bedtime Math app, launched in 2012, spurs family math talk by sending parents daily word problems prefaced by a paragraph of story - about everything from subway-riding dogs to galactic travel - illustrated with a photo or video.

Parents and kids choose from four related math questions that progress in difficulty - from counting and pattern completion to multiplication and division. There's a "sky's the limit" challenge question that may tap algebra or geometry, but the app is geared to kids aged three to nine.

"If we talked about ninjas or giraffes at dinner, then the math story that night would be about ninjas or giraffes. It was always off-the-cuff and fun."

Laura Overdeck, founder and president, Bedtime Math Foundation

The Bedtime Math parents interviewed for this column said they kept using the app because their kids requested it. "If my wife and I had a date night, or a party, or some other engagement, my daughter would make sure we forwarded the link to our sitter," said Ajay Shroff of Summit, New Jersey.

"My husband and I love numbers," said Overdeck, who has a degree in astrophysics and an MBA. Her husband, John, majored in math and statistics. "Math is like dessert at our house."

Before Bedtime Math was an app, it was the Overdecks' nightly routine with their children. When their oldest was two, they started to work numbers into the bedtime stories. They'd count stuffed animal eyes and noses, for instance, and eventually started dropping basic addition and subtraction into playful stories they'd make up on the spot.

"If we talked about ninjas or giraffes at dinner, then the math story that night would be about ninjas or giraffes," said Overdeck. "It was always off-the-cuff and fun."

When their second child was two, he started to demand his own math problems when tucked in at night. Eventually other parents in their community of Short Hills, New Jersey, heard about this, and Overdeck agreed to email them some bedtime math stories they could tell their own kids.

"I emailed ten friends in town, and within a week the list had doubled," Overdeck said. It grew so fast that she quickly moved from emailing to posting math stories on Facebook, and then Tweeting them, before launching the app, which hundreds of thousands of parents have since downloaded.

Overdeck has kept the app simple. There are no fancy graphics, sound effects, scores, rewards or other gamification gewgaws.

"Once you start scoring, you risk kids feeling like they're being judged. You're right back in school," she said, and she insists that Bedtime Math is for parents and kids, not for classrooms. "The whole point of our brand is to signal to kids that there's fun math out here in the world outside of school."

So far, it seems to be working. In a 2015 Science study led by University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, nearly 600 first graders signed up for "Bedtime Learning Together" a disguised version of Overdeck's app that allowed a portion of families to get literacy questions rather than math problems with their daily stories. After a year, students whose families did math outscored those in the literacy group by an average of nearly three months of math achievement.

Admittedly, this was a school-year study, not a summer one. The other caveat concerns demographics. While the students in the study hailed from diverse backgrounds, they skewed affluent, and the real challenge of summer slide is among lower-income students. A Johns Hopkins University study following nearly 800 Baltimore students for several years found that lower- and middle-income students progressed academically at a similar rate during the school year, but the lower-income kids fell further behind each summer. By ninth grade, about two-thirds of the achievement gap between them and their more affluent classmates could be explained by an accumulation of summer learning loss.

Overdeck and her team have worked to spread Bedtime Math beyond affluent communities. Last fall, she partnered with the Newark, New Jersey, public schools to pilot an introduction of the app to families in six elementary schools via parent-teacher conferences. About 20 percent of those parents downloaded the app, which encouraged Newark superintendent Christopher Cerf to green-light the app's introduction at parent-teacher conferences in all the city's elementary schools this fall.

"Once we can link usage stats to individual students, then we can look at things like summer learning loss," said Cerf. (Individual student data would come from questionnaires; it is not collected by the app.) "But I would be pretty surprised if regular users did not see a greater carryover from year to year of their math progress."

At last April's White House Early STEM Symposium, the foundation committed to start similar partnerships with several other districts in the coming academic year.

Educators urge parents to weave more "math talk" into everyday family activities - from setting the table to baking a cake. Still, many people need a nudge to talk about math with their kids. Parents often see math as strictly the school's domain, and they'd be relieved to keep it there, because math makes them nervous and insecure. Studies suggest that up to 25 percent of college-educated Americans suffer from moderate or severe math anxiety.

Overdeck caught a glimpse of that when several of the parents she first emailed math stories - all successful, college-educated professionals - wrote to ask her to include the answers in the next batch. She did. The answers are provided in the app, too.

Math anxiety loomed large in the Science study. Beilock's team compared the data from children with more or less math-anxious parents (based on an initial survey). In families with parents low in math anxiety, Bedtime Math didn't do much for math scores unless it was used at least twice a week. But kids with the most math-anxious parents only had to use the app once a week for math gains equal to half a school year.

To Overdeck, these findings suggest that the app sparked more math talk in these homes all the time, not just with the app itself. Beilock and her team are still following the children in the Bedtime Math study as they transition from one grade to the next, but she can't speak about the new data until a paper is prepared for publication.

"If this app is changing how parents interact around math, then you could imagine it could be beneficial at a time when kids are not in school," Beilock said. "That would just be speculation. But I think it's fair speculation."
Clarification: This column was updated to clarify that the Bedtime Math app does not collect data on individual students. This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

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Mix a little math into that bedtime story - The Hechinger Report

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For many families, reading is as much a part of summer as cookouts and camp. But as the weather warms, math is often banished along with mittens and sweaters. And that's a problem. Studies of "summer math loss" find that the average kid forgets more than two months of math over the break.