Great Minds® founder and CEO Lynne Munson shares her family’s story and the Eureka Math2TM story in this post on the Special Education TODAY blog. Lynne writes about how dyslexia affected her child’s experience with math. For too long, the text and the design of classroom math materials had been getting in the way of her child’s success in math class. It wasn’t that her child couldn’t do the math—her child could; in fact her child excelled at it. But the readability of the curriculum her child’s school used was making it challenging for her child to access the math.
Lynne and her family worked with her child’s teachers to address the problem, and it is among the many factors that motivated Lynne and our team at Great Minds to ensure that Eureka Math2 is highly readable and accessible.
“Words should not stand in the way of learning math—or anything for that matter. A student’s identity as a mathematician should not be dictated by their reading ability or confidence. We must create a culture of access and equity in classrooms by improving the readability and accessibility of text without in any way sacrificing grade-level rigor,” Lynne writes in the post.
She explains in the post that the Eureka Math2 team worked with our Humanities team to master reading indicators, learn about phonics, phonemes, and phonetic patterns. Our math curriculum writers also became experts in decodability, dyslexia, and Universal Design for Learning theory. In the end, they made the new curriculum highly rigorous and accessible to all students.
Her child’s experience mirrors that of another student Lynne has come to know, Mya Gooden, who wrote to Lynne a few years ago and asked her to improve the readability of Great Minds’ first math curriculum, Eureka Math®. Lynne previously described how motivating Mya’s story was and how it also contributed to Great Minds’ efforts to provide students with classroom materials that are defined by high expectations and meet the needs of all learners.
As Lynne writes about our newest math curriculum: “Teachers can focus on teaching the rigorous math that all kids deserve, and students have a better chance to experience the joy of math from the earliest ages.”
