There are times during the school year when I think I spend too much time on a math topic….not because the kids seem bored with it or anything like that, but because I have to get so many concepts covered that I’m afraid I’ll run out of time; so spending more time than I’m “supposed to” occasionally stresses me out. But most of the time, I’m glad I spend so much time on concepts, even though I appear to be “behind” when talking with other teachers about “where we are.” When I say that I spend more time, it’s not that I make the students do worksheet after worksheet; instead, we practice/interact with the same skills in different ways, as I’m sure you do. For example, before the holiday break, we worked on finding the GCF. In the past, most of the students had only been taught one method to find GCF - by listing out the factors. I taught the students the prime factorization method and the ladder method (personally, I LOVE the ladder method, for most sets of numbers). Then we ha...