This summer, I had the opportunity to work with the Idaho Out-of-School Network to help develop, write, and roll out a brand-new math games curriculum for K-8 learners. It was an incredible chance to blend my classroom experience with expert insight to create something I know will make a real difference for kids.

A math education expert designed the original games, and my role was to help bring them to life. I dug into the Idaho State Content Standards to pinpoint exactly what each game was teaching, wrote reflection questions to deepen student thinking, connected the games to cross-curricular subjects and real-world career skills, and built in scaffolds to support students with different learning needs and disabilities. Our goal was to have the games ready for one of the Network’s out-of-school partners to pilot by the end of July — and I’m proud to say we hit that deadline!

As a general education elementary teacher, math has always been the subject where I’ve felt I had the most room to grow. I could teach the curriculum well enough, but I often found myself wishing I had more creative ways to introduce concepts and more engaging ways for my students to apply them. This externship gave me exactly that. I got to learn directly from math education experts who taught me new strategies for teaching math more effectively, and I walked away with a whole toolkit of games I can’t wait to bring into my own classroom this year.