Magical Math

Today’s Contributor: Lisa Rushing, CIC at T.A. Brown Elementary

As a Special Education Teacher I constantly look for ways to encourage, motivate, and build up students who feel somewhat defeated in reading or math. Most of the time I do not have the same resources as the general education teachers and sometimes struggle to find things appropriate to use at students’ ability and not grade level. I have always loved Raz-Kids for my students because it starts at a pre-k level and goes up to high school level to address reading needs. This year I have a student who came to me saying that he wasn’t good at math and hated it. I searched for something to overcome his obstacles. I found the magic tool that has him begging to use it. Its name is Prodigy. Did I tell you it is FREE?  It let me create different classes for different grade levels, too! And the students can access the game from home via computer or smartphone app!

This game is a more childlike version of Destiny. This lovely game starts out with students creating their wizard character then selecting the wand they want to cast spells with. The students must answer math problems to cast spells to defeat enemy wizards and rescue pets, earn armor, and travel through maps to challenges for them to conquer. The students receive instant feedback if they answered the question correctly. What is great is my students didn’t even realize that the first part of game was all part of an assessment of their math skills based off of the TEKS! All the teacher has to do is go to the Reports page to see all the wonderful data at the teacher’s fingertips.

Reports view:

Student Grade Level:

As you can see, the test assesses past current enrolled grade level. You can click the down arrows to see the exact problems the student missed or answered correctly. You can either let the game randomly give students problems in different domains or assign lessons to address the TEKS want them to work on. To do this, go to the planner and click “Create” and you will see the options below:

I selected “Plans align them to a standard” then selected by domain and then TEK. Then you select how many days you would like the student to work on the TEK.

The assessment report gives lots of useful information.

Class Level:

Class Domain Progress:

As you can see, this is a wonderful tool for teachers. But the best thing is students will beg you to play the game! I hear my students ask each other, “What level are you on?” I don’t have to suggest to the students to play at home; they do it already, and I can see when they did or didn’t. I hope this tool works magic with your students, too!