Mathematics: Little School

Little School offers a nurturing environment where children explore at their own pace and developmental level, using open-ended materials. As they grow, learn through discovery, and build relationships with staff and the children around them, they develop a sense of competence and trust in the world. Concepts of counting, number sense, sorting, patterns, and comparing size are all invaluable to toddlers—they need these skills to move on to more advanced math concepts in Lower School. Our students enjoy playing hands-on preschool math games and engaging in other activities daily to help them master these mathematical ideas in ways that are just as fun as playtime.

Mathematics: Lower School

The goal of our Lower School mathematics program is to provide opportunities for all students to see themselves as active doers of math​ematics. ​Allowing students to make sense of problems using real-life contexts helps them see math in everyday life. Students collaborate with each other, use tools and strategies that are both learned and discovered, and share their mathematical thinking both orally and in writing.

Our Lower School curriculum uses the Math In Focus (Singapore Math) program as its foundation. The program balances mastery of basic skills with a conceptual understanding. Students develop number sense through explicit instruction in mental math, problem solving, and the mathematical properties that underlie algorithms and strategies. Lower School students are also supported in developing their growth mindset, allowing them to persevere through challenging problems and see mistakes as learning opportunities.

One of the unique offerings of Lincoln School is our commitment to employing a full-time Math Specialist for our K–5 grades who works alongside, and directly with, students and teachers to plan, implement, and instruct lessons. This Math Specialist is a partner with both classroom teachers and parents to mathematically build upon what each individual student already knows. The specialist plans with teachers weekly and works in the classrooms two to five  times a week to instruct the whole class, a small group, or specific individuals and is tied into and key to students’ progression through the K–5 years.

Mathematics: Middle School

Our Middle School mathematics program includes a curriculum that develops important mathematical foundations along coherent learning progressions. Teachers provide fun and engaging situations that spark curiosity, offer a variety of entry points into the content, and place student thinking, collaboration, and reasoning at the center of learning. In order to take full advantage of this formative and foundational time, students are encouraged to take risks and learn from their mistakes in order to develop their mathematical competence.

Grade 6: Grade 6 uses Desmos as our primary platform, based on Illustrative Mathematics, as it offers a blend of paper and technology which creates a student-centered learning experience while incorporating a dynamic, interactive lesson. In this problem-based curriculum, students work on carefully crafted and sequenced mathematics problems during most of the instructional time. The goal is to provide students with enough background and tools to solve initial problems successfully, and then challenge them with increasingly sophisticated problems as their expertise increases. 

Grade 7: Math 7 builds on students’ mathematical understanding by answering higher level questions that stimulate inquiry, exploration, and discovery. Students begin by studying scale drawings, followed by Geometry and proportional relationships, operations on rational numbers, and finally expressions, equations, and inequalities. This class provides the foundation students need for success in the study of Algebra and Geometry. We will apply some of these topics while learning about financial literacy topics, including participating in The Stock Market Game, a national contest.

Grade 8: We offer two different math classes in Grade 8 to best support all students as they prepare for Upper School:

Algebra I:  Algebra I teaches students new skills and strategies for dealing with numerical problems. Working collaboratively to justify approaches to problems and develop meaning from a current level of concept understanding creates a thinking classroom. Topics include a review of positive and negative numbers, simplifying expressions, solving equations, operations with polynomials including exponent laws, factoring, coordinate graphing, equations and inequalities in one and two variables, systems of linear equations, fractional equations, radical expressions, and the quadratic formula. 

Pre-Algebra: This course focuses on strengthening and expanding beginning Algebra skills, building upon what students have learned in Grade 7. Students use what they know about similar triangles to explore slope as they study linear relationships, then solve linear equations with variables on both sides of the equal sign, and systems of linear equations. Functions, specifically what makes a relationship a function is explored next. Students end the year exploring properties of exponents and scientific notation as a tool for representing very large and very small quantities.