The Importance of Spiral Review.

We've all heard of serial review.  Spiral review is where you have students practice key concepts and skill throughout the year on a regular basis rather than just when it is taught.

Spiral reviews have several advantages such as giving students multiple opportunities to maintain the skills they've already learned or strengthen any skills they are not yet proficient with.

Spiral reviews also give teachers a chance to assess where the student stands in his or her mastery of the concept or skill and can see how much progress the student has made.  Furthermore using spiral review helps increase student confidence and reduces time spent in prepping for state tests.

There are quite a few ways to use spiral reviews in class and many do not take much time to create.

1.  Use problems from previous sections during the warm-up so students regularly get to practice and review this material.  Look at previous skills and rotate through them on a regular basis adding new topics as needed and spreading the practice of mastered matured materials so they appear less frequently.

2.  Use 5 question quizzes at the end of class.  Make sure each week's worth of quiz problems are in the same format for each question.  For instance is the first question asks students to rewrite the standard form of a linear equation into the slope - intercept form, then every first question for the week should be that type of question.

3.  If you have stations in your classroom, one station should have review problems on previous material.  Let students work in pairs so they can help each other because the increases their learning when they have to explain it to others.  This is where you could use previous worksheets, problems, or activities you had to skip over earlier.

4.  Use math games to provide the spiral review.  Students love to play games and are willing to play them, even if they aren't fluent in the topic.  I've found students who are unwilling to try during the instructional part class will make an effort during games.  I often use games as the warm-up with material from previous classes.  My students love, love, love it.

5.  Create task cards that cover various standards and have broken down the standards into different levels.  The task cards should be different types rather than all the same kind. For instance, they might have to find an equation on one card, while they have to explain how to identify what the line looks like when it graphed to looking for patterns.  Get creative.  Add challenges to make each task card differentiated so the more advanced student is not bored.

6.  Throw in a review question in with the exit ticket at the end of the lesson. The review question focuses on previous material and is included with the question on the current material.

The nice thing about using spiral reviews is that this spaces practice out across time and this is a best practice.  It helps move the learning from short term memory to long term memory.  So if you are have not incorporated the spiral review in your classroom, give it a try.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.