Spotlight: Peoria Heights Grade School

Peoria Heights Grade School (CUSD #325) has used BlueStreak Math in its classrooms for three years, winning nine BlueStreak Nationwide Contests along the way. 

To better understand how the Illinois grade school is using the program—and the growth they’re seeing as a result—we caught up with third-grade teacher Gwen Clayton and fourth-grade teacher Cali Moreno. 

Overview: Peoria Heights + BlueStreak Math

Why they love BlueStreak

• Lowering anxiety and building confidence in mathematics
• Flexible, low-lift implementation
• Adaptive to challenge all students
• Actionable, easy-to-understand data
• Real-world enthusiasm  with contests and trophies

How they’re using it

• Tier 1
• Third & fourth grade
• Modules: Whole numbers, fractions, and decimals
• Learning games: As early finishers, autonomous practice to facilitate one-on-one support, and acceleration for high performers
• Data: For report cards, MTSS referrals, and growth tracking for student progress

Read below for the full feature!

Laying the Foundation for Long-Term Success

Math anxiety is a real problem, and one many grade school teachers have grappled with over the last decade or so, after research like that of Stanford math professor Jo Boaler revealed its impact on students’ long-term success in the subject. 

“Timed math tests can discourage students, leading to math anxiety and a long-term fear of the subject,” Boaler wrote in 2014. 

For many schools and districts, this meant taking a hard look at math fluency and all of the flashcards, timed tests, and multiplication tables that came with it. For Clayton, the effect on third-grade curriculum was tangible. 

“I’ve been teaching for eight years. When I first started, it was a huge part of my math curriculum,” she recalls. “Then there was a dip halfway through, where you almost didn't want to even talk about it, and now it’s back. I think the main reason is because we’ve talked to the fourth grade teachers so much and have realized how essential it is that students do know those facts. If they don’t, everything is more difficult.”

Now, math fluency is a major focus in Peoria Heights third-grade classrooms, with BlueStreak playing a foundational role in building student fluency skills critical for fourth grade and beyond. 

“I tell [my fourth graders] all year long, if you don't know your facts, it’s just making all these other processes longer,” fourth grade teacher Cali Moreno says. “I can teach you strategies. We can count multiples and factor rainbows. But at the end of the day, it is going to be more frustrating to do a fourth-grade standard if you don’t know your basic facts because it’s going to take you longer for each problem.”

According to Clayton, it comes down to a pivotal mindset shift: viewing fluency as the solution to math anxiety rather than the root of it.

“I think knowing their facts really helps with that math anxiety, because they get less frustrated when it comes to doing everything else.” 

From ‘Fluency 1.0’ to ‘Fluency 2.0’: A New Approach

Of course, core to this belief and Peoria Heights’ overall emphasis on fluency is the belief that timed practice and repetition don’t inherently need to be anxiety-inducing. That’s where the right math fluency tool comes in. 

“If I do fact fluency tests and timed quizzes, they give me good data, but they don’t take away the anxiety portion of it,” Clayton says. “BlueStreak’s gamification really helps with that. It takes away the fear of failure. If they get something wrong, it’s just part of the game.”

At Peoria Heights, an engaging fluency program was a must-have to advance students’ fluency without burning them out on the flashcards and rote memorization characteristic of the “Fluency 1.0” approach used by many fluency flights and tools. 

“By the time they would get to us in third grade, they were kind of burned out and over it,” Clayton remembers. “So we were looking for more exciting things to get them engaged.”

That’s when BlueStreak entered the scene. BlueStreak’s “Fluency 2.0” approach uses research-based learning methods and modern, student-centric learning games to build student confidence and maximize engagement. 

Peoria Heights piloted the program and committed to practicing what BlueStreak calls “fluency with fidelity,” or using the program for at least 15 minutes per day. This allowed them to get a feel for the platform’s systematic approach to fluency and see tangible results from continual usage. 

“I noticed right away that my kids really liked the BlueStreak platform,” Clayton says. “They liked the games, they liked how quick it was, and I liked that too! You can tell there’s a lot of thought that has gone into it: the learning cards, the games, the mastery. Everything has been so well thought out.”

Following the pilot, the Illinois grade school decided to stick with the program and has been using it for two years since. Teachers like Clayton have remained consistent with the 15 minutes/day ever since, even though how they use BlueStreak during the school day has shifted. 

Flexible, Low-Lift Implementation

Effective in just 15 minutes per day, BlueStreak’s autonomous, gamified experience makes it easy for Peoria Heights to implement across classrooms and grade levels, even in already-full math blocks.

Because students see BlueStreak’s single-player and multiplayer learning games as a fun reward, Clayton often uses the digital math fluency program as an early finisher, ensuring her students get their 15 minutes in each day for fidelity, but doing so flexibly within her schedule.

Moreno, on the other hand, has her class work in BlueStreak independently, opening the door to more time for direct support for struggling students. 

“I do something called the grid method, where the kids are working at their own pace to complete the math chapter,” she says. “As they get to certain benchmarks, they will start doing BlueStreak as the fill-in time for me to pull kids back to my table to give the one-on-one help.”

But it’s not just these students who benefit from BlueStreak’s adaptive approach, which is module- rather than grade-based to meet students where they are. Moreno also appreciates how BlueStreak provides higher-performing students the opportunity to be challenged. 

“It’s been great having decimals added for fourth grade; even my higher [performing] kids are learning from that,” she says. “Even though they won’t get to adding decimals until fifth grade, those higher kids need some enrichment, and we struggle with that a lot. We get to the kids that we pull back to our table, but we don’t always get to those higher ones to stretch them a little bit more.”

BlueStreak’s real-time data and performance dashboards also support this adaptability by enabling teachers to easily monitor progress while encouraging student independence.

“The data we get from it is definitely valuable,” says Clayton. “It’s really easy to understand, and it’s easy for the kids to understand, which I like a lot, because with some of the websites we use, I have to pull things up and show the kids how they’re doing. On this, they can be extremely independent and still get that automatic feedback. That makes things easier for me for sure, and it also gives them more self-accountability, which we’re always working on, especially in third and fourth grade.”

This flexible approach has enabled the school to use BlueStreak consistently, resulting in higher usage, greater levels of growth, and a whole lot of trophies…

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Digital Engagement Meets Real-World Enthusiasm

Teachers and administrators at Peoria Heights praise BlueStreak’s gamification of math fluency, especially multiplayer learning games and self-serve mastery data, for fostering greater student investment in mathematics.

But it’s not just digital learning games getting students excited about learning their math facts. 

All schools using BlueStreak Math are automatically enrolled in the BlueStreak Nationwide Monthly Contest. The winning school is the one with the most equations mastered on average per student, meaning smaller schools and schools like Peoria Heights—that use BlueStreak strategically at only specific grade levels—can win. At the end of each month, BlueStreak celebrates the contest winners with trophies for the school, top 3 students, and those students' teachers. 

As a 9-time winner of the contest, Peoria Heights has developed its own ritual for celebrating its wins as a school, as well as the top students.

“When the trophies get to our school, our principal, Mrs. Alvarado, will go down to the cafeteria at lunch time when the third and fourth graders eat together,” Clayton says. “She’ll announce who won, and the kids will bang on the tables, cheer, and just go nuts celebrating. And they get really excited to carry the trophies the rest of the day.”

It’s just another way BlueStreak is striving to reimagine the math fluency learning experience.

“We love it because it’s a tangible reward for an online thing. That doesn’t happen very often. That’s very unique to BlueStreak.”

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Contact us to learn more about BlueStreak Math’s “Fluency 2.0” approach and how it can help reinvigorate your students’ growth and confidence in mathematics. 

Request a walk-through

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