Spiral Review, Setting up Students for Success

As we dive into the school year, my focus has been on the concepts I want my students to learn and how I will develop their understanding of math concepts further. I have used spiral review, or spiral learning in the past, with quite a bit of success. I am definitely going to explore it a lot more this year, as it is such a great way for students to learn, succeed, and even develop goal-setting skills. I’d love to share with you some tips and tricks I have learned along the way!

Spiral reviews, or spiral learning, are a great way for students to learn new skills, and then revisit them. Each time they are revisited, or reviewed, more complex learning experiences are presented. Students become masters in particular skills, like figuring out decimal place value or practicing order of operations. Why? Because they return to the same concepts or skills throughout the school year (and beyond).

So what do spiral reviews provide students?

Practice Practice Practice with Spiral Review!

I don’t necessarily agree with the phrase, “practice makes perfect” because I don’t think you should place a ceiling on success. However, practicing and revising students is a proven way that students can more easily understand a topic or skill. These skills will assist them in their schooling life (and beyond)!

Independent Work and Self-assessment Learning Experiences

Each time a concept or skill is revisited in spiral learning, it should be learned at a deeper level. This can be done using individual learning experiences. Students, when reviewing the topic, will be able to determine what topics they could be provided even more challenging learning experiences with. They can also identify which areas they need more assistance in. Because they are reviewing the concepts again and again, individual learning experiences will allow students to improve at their own pace.

Opportunities to Succeed

Revising skills and topics can help students achieve throughout the school year. Some students may get it straight away which is great! However, for those students who need to review topics to fully understand them, they have more than one opportunity to succeed. This will improve students’ self-confidence and encourage them to push themselves further.

I think one of the best things about spiral reviews is that they can be used in so many subject areas. Do you want students to learn and revise treble note names in music? Spiral reviews are awesome for this! Keen for your science class to understand the life cycles of animals? You guessed it, spiral reviews could be used. Learning about poetic devices in Language Arts? Spiral reviews are as good as gold (simile puns aside, they are a really valuable tool to assist student learning).

What types of resources do I love when using this style of learning? Particularly for independent learning, I love self-checking and interactive resources. I will teach the concept to the class, and then students can use interactive resources to test themselves. I can even use resources with different levels of complexity to differentiate for each of my students.

Do you want to try something for free?

If you’re looking for different ways to practice math with your students, this is a perfect activity. This growing bundle has some great targeted math resources that can help you on your spiral learning journey. This resource looks at integers, negative numbers, and relative numbers.