Practice what your child's class is learning now

Your child can now practice the math the class is working on at school, right in Level Up. School-topic practice is an important addition to Level Up, our K-8 math program, and one we've been working on for a while. Before releasing it to everyone, we tested it with teachers and students and used their feedback to make it better. It's now available to every family using Level Up.

Level Up starts with an assessment of your child's math, then practice begins at the earliest gaps it finds and works up from there. That order matters for building skills, but math class keeps moving to new topics regardless. If the class is learning volume right now, your child needs practice on volume too. School-topic practice connects the work on earlier gaps to the topic the class is on.

Why Level Up checks the earlier skills first

Most topics build on earlier skills, and if one of those is shaky, problems on the new topic are harder than they need to be. That's why school-topic practice doesn't simply hand your child problems on the topic. When your child chooses a topic, Level Up builds a practice plan for it.

First, Level Up checks the earlier skills the topic builds on, using what it already knows about your child's math from the assessment and from practice. Earlier skills that are already solid stay out of the plan. Any that still need to be learned go into it, each placed ahead of the topic skill that depends on it. The plan then guides your child through the topic's own skills until each one is mastered. It's a direct path toward the math the class is doing now, without you having to guess where the trouble is.

This short video shows how your child picks a topic and adds the plan to practice.

What a plan for volume looks like

In one walkthrough we recorded, choosing "Volume of rectangular prisms" (the volume of a box shape) produced a plan with the topic's skills and a few earlier skills to practice first. One of them was a fourth-grade skill: finding a rectangle's missing side from its area and its other side. A rectangle with an area of 24 square inches and one side of 6 inches has another side of 24 ÷ 6 = 4 inches. One of the topic's fifth-grade skills uses the same step on a box: a box with a volume of 60 cubic inches, a length of 5 inches and a width of 3 inches has a bottom of 5 × 3 = 15 square inches, so its height is 60 ÷ 15 = 4 inches. In both, you divide the total by the part you already know. If the rectangle version is shaky, the box version is harder than it needs to be. A child who already has those earlier skills goes straight to the topic's own skills.

Research points the same way. TNTP, an education nonprofit, looked at students starting Algebra I. Among students who knew most of the earlier material behind a new skill, those who also had all of its key earlier skills succeeded on it nearly twice as often as those missing more than half of them. We wrote about the study recently.

How school topics fit with the rest of Level Up

A school topic doesn't replace the work on earlier gaps; its plan is added to the rest of your child's practice. Its skills are mastered the same way as every other skill in Level Up: only when your child has shown them across easy and hard problems, not by a streak. When the class moves on, your child can switch to the new topic at any time, and once all of a topic's skills are mastered, the plan says so and your child can choose the next one.

You'll find school-topic practice in the "Current schoolwork" column of your child's practice dashboard. For families new to Level Up, it comes with the program, along with the assessment that finds the earlier gaps. To learn more, see how Level Up works.