BeCALM (Beginning Curriculum for Adults Learning Math) contains remote-ready units for adult learners who need math instruction at beginning levels (GLE 2-4).
Adults who are beginning math learners sometimes find themselves left behind by high school equivalency curricula, or stuck trying to memorize their way through calculations they don’t understand. What will help these learners is a conceptually-focused, cognitively rigorous curriculum that supports them in developing number and operation sense. Number sense is the ability to break down and recombine numbers in useful ways, based on a conceptual understanding of how numbers work. Developing number sense can help beginning learners improve their mathematical fluency without memorization, while building a solid foundation for later study.
While adult students at this math level may have any level of reading, the student materials were designed to be used by adults with a reading level GLE 2 or above. To keep things accessible, however, the text in the Student Packet is kept to a minimum, so it can be used with students who are beginning and intermediate English Learners as well with those at an ABE reading level.
Each unit contains a student packet and a teacher’s guide that can be downloaded as Word documents or PDFs. All materials are all available in both English and Spanish.
BeCALM Units:
- BeCALM Part 1 Number Sense (estimation and rounding, properties of addition, introduction to number lines)
- BeCALM Part 2 Operation Sense (subtraction concepts and methods, number lines, base ten number system)
- BeCALM Multiplication Concepts (arrays, expressions and equations, multiplication concepts and methods, distributive property)
- BeCALM Division Concepts (partitive division, inverse operations, inequalities, quotitive division)
- BeCALM Geometry (Composing and decomposing shapes, identifying basic shapes and attributes, right angles/parallel lines/symmetry)
- BeCALM Measurement and Data (Concept of a unit, use of length measurement tools, US Standard and Metric units for length, Collecting, representing, and describing data)
These materials were created with funding from the Adult and Community Learning Services division of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by the The SABES Mathematics and Adult Numeracy Curriculum & Instruction PD Center, which is managed by TERC, Inc.
