Materials considered for review for this indicator were STEM projects. The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 1 meet the expectations for this indicator. The review team found that the instructional materials assess grade level content beyond the scope of the grade; however, the items are Mathematically reasonable.

STEM Materials that assess grade level content beyond Grade 1.

• The Toothpicks and Marshmallows STEM Project on pages 75 – 88 of the teacher STEM project edition:
  • This project indicates that it addresses 1.G.A.2 Compose two-dimensional shapes (rectangles, squares, trapezoids, triangles, half-circles, and quarter-circles) or three-dimensional shapes (cubes, right rectangular prisms, right circular cones, and right circular cylinders) to create a composite shape, and compose new shapes from the composite shape. (Students do not need to learn formal names such as “right rectangular prism.”) However, the shapes students are asked to identify and create go beyond this grade level. Students are asked to identify and create pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, and octagons.
    

• Teddy Bear Airplane STEM project on pages 1 – 38 of the teacher STEM project edition:
  • This project asks students to measure using meter sticks. This is not to be addressed until Grade 2 according the 2.MD.A.1.
  • Measure the length of an object by selecting and using appropriate tools such as rulers, yardsticks, and measuring tapes

Review Team Note: A separate supplemental digital assessment database is available for an additional purchase cost. The review team did not analyze this supplemental digital assessment database as evidence for indicator 1a because this additional component is not provided as part of the core materials.

*Evidence updated 10/27/15

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 1 do not meet expectations for spending the majority of class time on the major clusters of the grade. A total of 61 activities/lessons are provided, and some may be repeated or take additional class periods. However, of the 61 lessons, 46 of them are aligned to major work of the grade according to the table of contents in the three resources reviewed. This would mean that if the 46 lessons were fully aligned, 75% of the time is spent on the major work of the grade. If you look more closely, the percent of time spent on major work would be below 75% considering that lessons are labeled as aligned to major work of the grade, but the activities in the lessons do not actually align. Here are a few examples of the misalignment:

• STEM "Harvest Time" is labeled as aligning with standard 1.NBT.B.3, but there is no mention of students or teachers using symbols (<,>, =) to compare numbers.
• ART lesson page 26, is labeled as aligning with standard 1.OA.C.6, but it does not correctly demonstrate the strategies for decomposing a number leading to ten or making ten to find a sum larger than ten.
• ART lesson page 72, is labeled as aligning with standard 1.NBT.C.4, but it does not require students to relate the strategy used to a written method and explain their reasoning.
• It is not clear how the one hundred target board assists with place value or addition.
• Teacher edition pages 1-12 is labeled as aligning with standard 1.OA.A.1 but there are no word problems used for addition and subtraction. There are computation problems for the problem types of "add to take from," "put together" and "take apart," but they are not used in word problems.
• Teacher edition page 263, is labeled as aligning with standards 1.NBT.C, but does not fully support the use of place value.
• Student exercise page 169 does not follow the standard for determining if equations involving addition and subtraction are true or false and simply asks students to make up equations and to solve a story problem.
• Teacher edition page 177 is labeled as aligning with standard 1.NBT.A.1 but it uses symbols to compare numbers, which does not fit the rest of the lesson.

The following are examples of work beyond the grade level:

• STEM "Teddy Bear Airline" is labeled as aligning with standard 1.OA.A.1 but students are asked to add three-digit numbers when the standard only asks for addition and subtraction within 20.
• ART Lesson page 89 is labeled as aligning with standard 1.MD.A.1 but asks students to measure objects using a ruler and to make a ruler by dividing ribbon into inches.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 1 do not meet expectations for content supporting focus and coherence. The review team identified several examples of missed opportunities for coherence below:

• The lesson for 1.MD in the teacher edition, page 452, has multiple line plots and data points and a few opportunities to connect with "how many more or less" with addition and subtraction work, but the majority of the work is "most popular/least popular" type situations that do not connect back to 1.OA.
• ART lesson page 127 does not support the work of partitioning and explaining halves, fourths and quarters. A pie cut in to 8 slices asks a student to know 1/4 = 2/8 which is not the CCSSM for Grade 1. It also asks students to divide 48 into quarters, which is above grade level work.
• ART book page 101 does not connect with major work of 1.MD.B.3.
• STEM "Toothpicks and Marshmallows" is labeled as 1.G.A but does not ask students to connect shape reasoning and attributes to 1.OA or 1.NBT.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 1 do not meet expectations because the amount of content is not viable for one school year.

• There are eight major clusters in Grade 1 and one of them is 1.MD.A. There are three lessons in the resources on MD.A and one STEM project (which does not fully address the standards of 1.MD.A). This is not an adequate amount of instructional time, or material, for that cluster. This means that teachers would need to find additional materials in order to cover the standards.
• In addition, the addition and subtraction situations of the CCSSM for Grade 1, as addressed by 1.OA.1, are not covered with the necessary depth. There would need to be a heavy reliance on teacher preparation to stretch the instruction.

The instructional materials for Grade 1 do not meet the expectations for consistency with the progressions in the standards.

• There is no mention of a grade-by-grade progression in the materials.
• Fluency standard 1.OA.C.6 is not fully developed in any aligned lessons.
• Problem situations are not consistent with the progression of story problem formats in context throughout the grade band and the progressions.
• Materials do not give students extensive work on grade level problems. All 12 problem situations for addition and subtraction should be worked on extensively.
• There is unlabeled off-grade level content on page 300 of the teacher edition. Students are expected to compute differences of numbers outside the grade level expectation of multiples of 10. For example, with numbers 59-48.

Above grade-level content is found on the following pages:

• Teacher edition lesson page 208 is not aligned to Grade 1 and does not build from Kindergarten. This is beyond the scope of the work for the grade.
• Above grade-level content is found on teacher edition pages 208, 272, 283, 309 and 344.

MPs are not aligned throughout lessons and instead are provided their own set of activities at the end of the book, pages 508-526. This practice is not consistent with a progression of content and a consideration of practices connected to content.

The materials contain vague language around student understanding and how learning should progress. For example, in teacher edition on page 376 it says, "Students should have some understanding that some objects are larger than others." It is unclear what is meant by "some understanding." There is more vague language on teacher edition page 59: "Students will understand the processes of addition and subtraction." The process of addition and subtraction could be interpreted as the act of computation.

For the aforementioned reasons and the evidence cited, the materials did not meet the expectations for consistency with the progressions in the standards for reviewed materials in Grade 1.

The Grade 1 instructional materials reviewed for coherence grade level do not meet the expectations. Learning objectives are written and either address learning at the individual standard level, simply restate the cluster statement, or are written as activities focusing on what the students will be doing, not what they will learn. Examples of this can be found in the teacher edition on page 44; in the ART book on pages 10, 44 and 115; and "Harvest Time" on STEM page 40.

Each lesson is taught in isolation as a standard or a cluster of standards within the same domain. There are times when clusters and standards are placed sequentially, however there is little evidence of coherence at the cluster level to "understand and apply properties of operations and the relationship between addition and subtraction" (1.OA.B) and "use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract are not connected at an appropriate level" (1.NBT.C).