
A letter from Gabe Burnstein, Head of School
This February, math is my valentine.
Teachers are hard at work preparing to implement a new math curriculum, Illustrative Math for the fall of 2025. This is an important pillar of our strategic plan. We have also adopted Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms framework for how we teach math, harnessing the power of research-based practices to allow teachers to implement more complex, rich, and engaging math challenges which creates an explosion of deep critical thinking, problem solving, and real world applications.
My favorite part of my week is when I get to observe math instruction at CRS. It is so much fun watching academic excellence in action as children solve problems they have never seen before. Our students are not sitting passively as teachers pour algorithms into their heads. Our Otters are up on their feet, doing the math: writing on the whiteboards around the room, using manipulatives to solve problems, collaborating with classmates to come up with different ways to attack a challenge, and drawing diagrams to explain their thinking.
Math is so active at CRS I expect to see Coach Billy and Coach Rupp running around and setting up cones.
This winter, I watched PreK students build their foundation by identifying geometrical shapes. They explained to me the differences between squares and rectangles. Then they used shapes to make self portraits and explained their choices. When I tried my own, I got some good math related feedback. “Mr. Burnstein, your mouth is a rectangle, not a square!” (Noted.)
Fourth graders were multiplying two digits by one digit, two digits, and three digits and using the data from our community food drive for the Needham Food Pantry to make real world connections. Laura Mutch challenged students to figure out the total number of serving sizes for each group of canned foods collected.
A fourth grader explained it to me. “Say there are 4 servings of corn in that can, and we had 65 cans of the exact same thing. That would be 260 servings.”
Her partner nodded. “It’s a lot of corn.” They giggled and got back to work.
In our classrooms, what is obvious is that the student engagement is so high. The tasks are challenging, and our students are up for it. This work demonstrates the power of relevant and meaningful problem solving that fuels deep understanding and skill acquisition.
To put it another way: love is in the air for math at CRS.
With gratitude,
Gabe