At Fishtank, we love celebrating and sharing the amazing things teachers are doing with Fishtank in their classrooms. We recently had the chance to speak with one of our Fishtank Math teachers Kerri Lintl about the impact Fishtank has had on her instruction and her students’ success. Kerri, a 16-year veteran of the elementary classroom and current 3rd grade teacher, has been using Fishtank Plus in her classroom since 2022 at a small rural school in Wisconsin.
Finding Fishtank Learning
When it comes to curriculum, Kerri knows what her and her students need: content that is accessible, relevant, and covers all the standards. Before finding Fishtank, Kerri had been using a few other curriculum resources that she thought were ok, but not perfect. Often, the resources she found were very dense, wordy, and hard for her students to relate to. Then came Fishtank Math!
When a student teacher first introduced Kerri to Fishtank Math, she was immediately excited about it: the content covered all the standards, plus she could see that the work would be accessible and relatable for her students: “The biggest part was that it was easy for them to access, and when I say easy to access, I mean they could relate to it right away. There weren't any boundaries in their way as far as their learning was concerned. The curriculum really broke it down into little neat pieces for them to learn one thing at a time.”
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Focused on Instruction, Not Instructional Materials
In that first year with Fishtank Math, Kerri was using a free Fishtank Learning account. She liked it so much that she wanted to upgrade to Plus and unlock even more content and classroom resources. Both the ready-made lesson slides and editable handouts were hugely helpful for Kerri’s daily planning and instruction. Before, she was making slides for each lesson on her own, and struggling to present them clearly using screenshots. With Plus, there was never an issue and her slides were simple, effective, and allowed students to easily follow along.
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With the power of Fishtank Plus on her side, Kerri was able to fully focus her time and attention on teaching, not creating materials: “As far as planning goes, then I'm really planning on what I'm teaching that day and how I want to go about delivering my lesson, not about what's behind me on the board. I have the tools to deliver the message.”
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With editable handouts, Kerri has been able to align materials with the time constraints of her classroom and the specific needs of her students: “All the pieces that go with being able to edit the worksheets has been huge because I know how much time I have and I can take out questions that I know we will not get to. Or I could reword a question if there's something that my students just weren't understanding—a language piece—I could just switch it for them.”
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Overall, Kerri felt that the lessons were “very efficient and very effective for my learners [compared to] the way I had done it in the past and that comes from the slides and the ability to really tailor the work that's available to what I need for my students.” She was clear about Fishtank Plus, “It was worth the money.”
Leveraging Mathematical Language
As Kerri deepened her use of Fishtank materials in the classroom, she noticed that, not only were her students able to access and relate to the material, but they internalized the mathematical language too.
Within each lesson, Kerri has found that the “way skills are broken down is really effective. There's never too much at once.” And, in moments when students were struggling to grasp a new concept, she was confident that they would get more opportunities to engage with those skills because “everything does come back. Fishtank brings the concepts back in the story problems so we can revisit them.”
One major shift Kerri has seen in her classroom is her students’ ability to understand and employ mathematical language. When approaching word problems, students understand “the problem as they read it and aren’t getting confused about what they were asking for. They can differentiate what they’re supposed to do for the problem easily.”
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Beyond their ability to understand the language used, students were able to use new mathematical language confidently. From the in class conversations, Kerri knew students understood concepts because “they're able to explain it to a friend. When friends can explain it, and explain it well, I think that's super telling of how much they understand it.”
Student Success in 3rd Grade and Beyond
Because Kerri is in a small school community, she has the opportunity to see her students throughout their elementary education journey and beyond. With that, she has seen the impact of Fishtank Math in her 3rd grade classroom, and has seen how her students carry those skills and conceptual understandings to find success in 4th grade.
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When asked about the overarching positive impact of Fishtank Math, Kerri shared that her scores were up, but she also pointed out the bigger picture: “You don't always know if you're reaching them or whether they're going to remember the skills in the next year, but because we're so much a small school, my class is doing very well in fourth grade as far as adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. The other teachers are like, ‘they totally get it.’
More so than just an increase in scores or students’ ability to talk about the content, Kerri felt that talking to her students' next teacher was “a more effective way to look at whether [her students] really understand it because, not only did they understand it, they retained it and then they're able to reuse it in a broader way.”
Many thanks to Kerri for sharing her experience using Fishtank Math! Want to be the next teacher we Spotlight? Tell us how Fishtank has impacted you and your students.