School News
- Last Updated on Friday, 30 December 2016 00:18
Ms. Diana Maresch, a second grade teacher at St. Elizabeth Elementary School in Pleasant Hills, was recently awarded an educational grant from Reflex Math, providing her complete access to Reflex Math's online math program.
The Reflex Math program is an adaptive and interactive math system that helps students achieve fluency with math facts by focusing on learning the relationship of fact families and understanding the nature of inverse operations. Instead of learning math facts individually on flash cards, students are presented with related facts or number families simultaneously, allowing them to see and understand the correlation between the numbers and achieve fluency more efficiently. This Reflex Math grant allows Ms. Maresch to utilize Reflex Math's innovative online math program with the entire second grade class at St. Elizabeth Elementary.
In just a few short weeks of working with the program, Ms. Maresch has experienced great success. Most notably, she discovered that her students' math fact fluency scores had doubled during a two week period. Perhaps just as noteworthy is the fact that the children are engaged and excited about math.
Ms. Maresch has been teaching at St. Elizabeth for 37 years, the last 30 years of which she has devoted to teaching second grade. She is also the recipient of a Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh Grant, which allowed her to purchase additional scientific equipment for her classroom and her students. She exemplifies the dedication and persistence of St. Elizabeth’s teachers to continually seek and learn new methods of teaching to better prepare students for the future.