Math Spiral Review: A Quick Start Guide

How many times have you taught something one month, and then a few months later your students seem to have completely forgotten what they learned? I know we’ve all been there at least once. That’s why I love implementing spiral review.

And guess what? I know your days are busy, busy, busy, but you can implement spiral review in just a few minutes a day!

Here’s a quick guide to spiral review!

3 Helpful Tips for Implementing Spiral Review

Tip #1: Keep it short!

I suggest aiming for 2-3 minutes a day, but spend no more than 5 minutes on spiral review. Anything longer than this can take away from the critical content you already have planned!

Tip #2: Have a plan of the spiraling skills you want to cover.

In the past, I’d create a new problem or set of problems for my students to review each day. However, as a teacher who has a million tabs open in her brain at once, this didn’t work out so well. I’d forget to review certain skills, have trouble coming up with problems and examples to review, and I couldn’t keep up!

That’s why it’s incredibly important to plan and organize the content you want to review! In my Problem of the Day resources for first grade and second grade, I’ve laid out the math skills to review each month.

Tip #3: Build spiral review into your routine.

Think about when and how you want to incorporate spiral review into your daily routine. In some classrooms, this could be the first thing students work on after they get settled in the morning. You could also implement it during calendar time, at the beginning of small group instruction, or at the beginning of whole group instruction!

Problem of the Day Spiral Review Resource

If you’re a first grade or second grade teacher, I created two of my resources specifically for math spiral review, and this problem of the day resource is my favorite! *Keep reading to find a free week to try!

The first spiral review I love is my Problem of the Day resource. My favorite part about this resource is that, if you want, you can fit an entire month of problems on one page! I designed these to be super quick to complete.

Plus, your students can do 4 weeks of one problem a day, and then at the end of the month, they can complete the final 5 problems as a quick assessment! It’s totally up to you to how you decide to implement it!

This resource is also available in a weekly format and a digital format. You can use the digital version to display each day’s problem at the front of the classroom.

At the end of this post, you can try a week of my problem of the day resource for free! Want more than just a week? You can find the entire first grade problem of the day here and the entire second grade problem of the day here!

Weekly Math Warm Ups

The second review resource is weekly math warm-ups, and they contain a few problems per day. These are organized weekly, and standards are listed on the pages!

You can find the first grade weekly math warm-ups here and the second grade weekly math warm-ups here.

You can read more about spiral review strategies in this related post!

Try These Free Math Spiral Review Resources