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=Core Academy 2013=

Welcome to the 2013 Core Academy in Elementary Mathematics. My facilitators and I hope you will enjoy your four days with us. Even more importantly, however, we hope you will come away more prepared to teach the 2010 Utah Core State Standards in your classroom. Most importantly, we sincerely hope that what we teach here and what you learn learn here will have a profound effect on your students. We hope they will understand why the mathematics they learn works the way it does. We hope they will become proficient and fluent with algorithms and with math facts. We hope they will be able to apply the mathematics they learn to real world problems and that they will solve those problems. We hope they will begin to see mathematics as a coherent whole rather than a series of disconnected facts. Of course, they will only have those life changing experiences as you do. We hope this academy will help you gain more confidence in the math you teach and with the math it connects to in earlier and later grades.

Here are some guidelines to consider in order to get the most out of this summer's academy:


 * Bring some grade level manipulatives such as linking cubes and shape tiles.
 * Bring the textbook or instructional materials you are currently using in your classroom, particularly the fractions chapter(s).
 * Bring a laptop computer or an iPad or other tablet. There will be internet access in each location, but with many people trying to access it at one time it could be slow.
 * We will have a flash drive for everyone containing all the materials from the core academy. We will be printing very little. If you have a laptop you will be fine since you can plug the flash drive into your computer and you are set.
 * We also have all the materials for the course on a wiki online. So, if you have a tablet with internet access you are still fine.
 * If you have a tablet computer I recommend you download and install the Common Core app from Mastery Connect. It is free and will save a lot of time.

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My facilitators and I want you to learn as much as you can during the core academy this year. In order to guide our efforts, would you please take a few moments and fill out the Needs Assessment survey? Just click on the link and it will take you right there. This is an anonymous survey, unless you choose to tell us who you are.

I hope you will have a marvelous experience this summer!

David A. Smith Elementary Mathematics Specialist Utah State Office of Education