Yes, all Daily Review Maker content starts with a thorough scoping and sequencing of the Australian Curriculum. This is paramount because it allows us to effectively track the curriculum to ensure we offer students enough spaced retrieval practice of each component of the curriculum. An example of an effective scope and sequence, and curriculum tracking document can be found at shapingminds.com.au/maths-curriculum.
We have a team of teacher creators from all learning areas and levels of phase. These experienced teachers are hand picked because of their authentic experience designing and delivering high-impact daily reviews in the classroom. We extensively test all materials at schools and with real students to ensure they hit the mark, and if they don’t, we simply don’t include them.
We currently have over 80,000 maths slides for K-6. Next will be a similar volume for English, and then nearly all other learning areas will follow including HASS, Science, Health, Art, languages and more.
When completed, this collection will cover content from the entire Australian Curriculum.
We recommend updating your content regularly by changing values and mixing up the order of activities. Some elements may stay consistent for a while to allow students to build familiarity, but students benefit from spaced and interleaved practice. Try to tailor your daily reviews to meet the diverse needs of your learners by regularly refreshing and mixing up the content to maximise engagement and long-term learning.
Differentiation is a big deal for teachers. It refers to the modifications to instruction and content that teachers make when catering to the varying needs of their students. Any teacher will tell you, it is easier said than done, and to maintain it across every learning opportunity is very challenging. That’s why we have made differentiation a major feature of the Daily Review Maker. Our chilli and grid formats are an engaging way to present different levels of content for students (remediation – at level – extension). Students need daily exposure to content that challenges them, while also having lots of exposure to success. Differentiation in daily review is perfect because it is embedded in the formats and routines, so that teachers aren’t trying to constantly invent these moments for their students.
A standard account affords one teacher full access to Daily Review Maker for a full year from the time of purchase.
A school account is billed in the same way, but a school or system representative will manage multiple accounts.
If your membership lapses or you cancel it, you will still retain the daily reviews that you created so far.
All learning areas will be included in the one membership price.
Regardless of whether you’re following a strict curriculum or your own teaching plan, the essence of daily review is dedicating 10-30 minutes at the start of each session to help students actively retrieve key facts and skills. This includes not only recently taught material but also fundamental concepts and skills that students may benefit from reinforcing. By consistently revisiting both new and foundational content, you ensure that students are retaining knowledge, and discovering any areas that require more review.
At the heart of the Science of Learning and more specifically to the strategy of Daily Review, the goal is for students to become automatic with the fundamentals of the learning area. Whether it is vocabulary knowledge, letter sounds, number facts, definitions, formulae, important relationships between ideas, or procedural knowledge of complex skills — the goal is for students to encode that information to long-term memory where they can access it freely. Think of things that you just know without even trying. This is what we want for our students in relation to our fundamental content from each learning area. Cognitive scientist John Sweller highlights that an important connection to Cognitive Load Theory is that information stored in long-term memory no longer burdens working memory, in other words, it doesn’t require more effort to think about. So, no matter what you are teaching, you will always have fundamental facts and skills that you want students to be automatic in. This is essentially what daily review is for.
items:
1x class set of mini whiteboards (and lots of extra markers)
1x class set of pop sticks or playing cards with students names written on for sampling answers from students.
routines:
– A call and response routine to regain attention after pair-shares (tick, tick – boom!)
– Partner roles for pair-share (Student A and Student B – i.e., As tell Bs)
– Routines of engagement (e.g., Hollingsworth & Ybarra’s Engagement Norms)
Over more than a decade designing and innovating daily reviews, we have discovered several strategies for delivering content and checking for understanding that heightens their impact. An example of this are our unique differentiation chilies (mild-hot-extra spicy). These routines are embedded throughout our content, and we are constantly on the lookout for new formats that are engaging and meaningful for students.
We consider it a bit of a misunderstanding that some teachers believe you shouldn’t teach during a daily review. If it discovered though checking for understanding that students misunderstand something, you are obligated to correct that immediately at the point of error. Formative assessment expert Dylan Wiliam emphasises the importance of this kind of point of error instruction. Hollingsworth and Ybarra also highlight the importance of effective feedback (E in TAPPLE). We therefore encourage teachers to constantly check for understanding using strategies like mini whiteboards and non-volunteers to identify any gaps or misconceptions, and where necessary, make targeted corrections.
Timing depends on many things, but we recommend daily reviews in the vicinity of 10–30 minutes that occur at the start of a teaching block. Daily reviews are essentially made up of many sections, so a teacher has many exit and entry points, which makes it very adaptable. Students might start off only getting through 3–5 sections of content in a daily review, but once more familiar, they will surprise you with the volume of content they can handle.
Before the daily review routines are embedded for students, the process can be slow and cumbersome. Students experience significant cognitive load when trying to learn new routines while also processing the content. Students will develop automaticity to both of these in time, so pursue a brisk pace, but also know that this comes with time.
If your question isn’t listed here, use the contact form to let us know and we will get back to you ASAP.