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]]>For over 20 years, Discovery Education has empowered educators to inspire curiosity, build confidence, and accelerate learning. As education evolves—shaping how students learn, increasing demands on teachers, and adding complexity to classrooms—we have evolved too, continuously innovating to meet these changing needs. This year, we’re introducing updates designed to make teaching more effective, engaging, and personalized—ensuring educators have the support they need to create lasting, meaningful learning experiences. And while many of these updates support educators, others are designed for students, nurturing their natural curiosity and joy in learning.
With every advancement, improvement, and new offering we bring, one thing will remain constant: our commitment to being the most trusted learning partner, equipping educators and engaging students to succeed in a dynamic world. We’ve listened closely to students, teachers, school leaders, district administrators, and the broader educational community as they have shared their challenges, celebrations, and concerns, and these meaningful conversations have informed our work for the back-to-school season.
Innovative Tools to Enhance Teaching and Learning
Teachers tell us they spend countless hours on assessments, lesson planning, and differentiation. In fact, 94% of educators seek tools that give them time back to focus on students. We’re helping streamline these tasks with new enhancements in Experience, including:
Personalized Content Recommendations
There are thousands of amazing, standards-aligned resources in Experience. Now, finding the perfect resource for any lesson is even easier. Our new Curriculum Aligned Resources feature allows educators to quickly access handpicked content to enhance their core curriculum. Teachers can also get recommendations based on their unique profile and preferences to suggest relevant resources specifically curated for their classroom.
AI TeacherTool | Assess
Our new AI-powered assessment generator allows educators to create standards-aligned assessments in minutes. Teachers can easily customize by reading level, question type, and Bloom’s Taxonomy—all while leveraging Discovery Education’s trusted, cross-curricular resources.
Improved Integrations
With the new Google Add-on, Discovery Education Experience now integrates seamlessly with Google Classroom, making access to quality content easier and more efficient for educators and students. The new integration offers simplified assignments, more focused access for students, and time-saving workflows for lesson planning.
Enhancing Math Engagement and Support for Educators
Over 90% of teachers believe that personalized instruction can improve learning outcomes, such as test scores, learning retention, and academic performance. As educators work furiously to address declining math scores, we’re making sure they have the right support to differentiate math instruction and drive student outcomes.
Improved Accessibility
DreamBox Math lessons now integrate assistive technology, keyboard navigation, and multiple modalities to ensure all students can engage independently. Learn more about these updates HERE.
Enhanced Engagement
We are rolling out updates to some of the most popular lessons in DreamBox Math to make it easier for students to start, play, and complete lessons successfully. Students will find clearer, always-available instructions, updated scaffolding, enhanced visuals, easier interactivity, and added real-world context for mathematical concepts.
Refreshed Middle School Math Environment
We know that students will feel more engaged and excited about algebra readiness when they can work in an age-appropriate environment. The new middle school environment has a sleek new look and introduces an upgraded lesson chooser, making it easier for students to navigate assignments and personalized lessons. Check out the new middle school experience HERE.
Helpful Curriculum Guide
The new in-product interactive curriculum guide enables educators to explore and align lessons with state standards for targeted instruction. Learn more about the curriculum guide.
Building Future-Ready Classrooms
Students crave access to content that excites and inspires them. And, when educators spark connections showing how daily lessons apply inside of class and beyond, they can make learning meaningful. In fact, 80% of students believe that content that connects to real-world experiences is essential for their day-to-day learning.
Career Connect Available to All Experience Partners
Career Connect brings industry professionals right into classrooms, allowing teachers to request virtual visits from employee volunteers. The feature provides experiential knowledge that reinforces educational concepts as it relates to real-world problem solving and innovation.
New Career resources in Experience will help educators show students the real-world relevance of their daily learning while building career awareness, exploration, and preparedness. These resources provide a strong connection to K-8 instruction, ensuring that career readiness begins early and empowers students to imagine endless possibilities beyond the classroom.
New, Exciting Lessons Across Our Programs
- New Experience Lessons: Experience’s vast library of curated educational content continues to grow to meet the needs of modern K-12 classrooms. For back-to-school, educators will find even more instructional resources with an Enhanced Instructional Strategy Library and Model Lessons. Students and teachers will also have access to new K-2 civics lessons, ELA Fix-It Models for middle school, and new DE Original videos for ELA and social studies.
- DreamBox Reading Expands to Grade 5: DreamBox Reading’s adaptive engine, already providing personalized reading instruction for PreK-2 students, will now support literacy development for grades 3-5. New lessons include foundational phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies, helping older students master essential reading skills.
- More Mystery Science Fun: Mystery Science will feature new resources, including open-and-go lessons and vocabulary supports on topics like matter and water. Plus, we’re updating Anchor Layers on all units.
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]]>The post Leveling Up Middle School Math Engagement with DreamBox appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>Middle school is a time of growth and discovery—a time when students connect to their personal and academic identities. For educators, it’s a pivotal period for nurturing independence and agency in learning to promote engagement. This has always been a core value for DreamBox and critical for algebra readiness, an indicator of future success in college and careers.
DreamBox Math equips students with scaffolded personalized learning that fosters conceptual understanding. Students learn to think logically, identify patterns, construct arguments and solve new and unfamiliar problems.
Empowering Engaged and Motivated Learners
We believe that learning math should inspire confidence, curiosity, and creativity in every student. That’s why we are excited to introduce a new look for the DreamBox Math middle school experience. Designed to reflect the energy, interests, and routines of today’s middle schoolers, this update isn’t just about the technology—it’s about empowering engaged, motivated learners to see the adventure in mathematics, rather than a simple problem set. In DreamBox we want to make every moment matter more, to make teaching and learning mathematics more engaging, motivating, and impactful.
Meeting a New Milestone
As 11-14-year-olds navigate this key developmental phase, they are eager to take more control over their learning choices. DreamBox, a trusted name in personalized, adaptive math instruction, has been part of many students’ journeys through elementary school. But middle school is different, and students are ready to level up.
We are committed to our partnership with educators and rely on their feedback to guide innovations that ensure the most for their students. To meet the evolving needs of learners, DreamBox tested early designs with students to learn what resonates in grades 6–8 and used their feedback to modernize the engagement.
The result? An exciting environment that combines an elevated age-appropriate environment and a more vibrant design that conveys a youthful sense of adventure and independence and thoughtfully crafted to support self-directed learning while maintaining a sense of fun and curiosity about math.
- Students will now have an easier time navigating lessons. The fresh lesson chooser design offers them greater clarity and ownership in their learning, with an Assignment panel that appears when teachers create assignments, enabling students to distinguish teacher-assigned tasks from lessons recommended by DreamBox.
- There’s something powerful about seeing your progress in real-time. With a prominently featured weekly goal tracker, students can’t miss an opportunity to self-monitor their achievements, stay motivated, and remain accountable to their learning goals.
- It’s augmenting math with an all-new vibe. Say hello to a fresh experience —this vibrant and engaging engagement is reflective of middle schoolers’ tastes and personal interests.
“I like this design better than the actual one . . . if you change your design like this and then people take a look at it, they're probably going to start wanting to work on DreamBox more often.”
Why Educators Will Love It
Middle school teachers and administrators will reap the benefits of these updates too. Students who feel more in control of their learning often engage at higher levels, making teaching not just easier, but more impactful.
Here’s how the new DreamBox middle school experience supports educators:
- Fostering Independence: With clear visibility into assignments and goals, students are equipped to take more ownership of their learning. Educators can simply assign lessons, confident that students will take the reins from there.
- More engagement: Students and educators both benefit from the learning impact of DreamBox with better data that informs teaching decisions with little to no additional effort.
- Meaningful Goal Tracking: Improved engagement means teachers get deeper insights into student learning.
Gazing into the Future
This is just the beginning. Updates to the middle school experience will continue into 2026 with:
- Student-Facing Reporting Tools designed to empower students to set and monitor their own progress—boosting both confidence and accountability.
- Exciting New Engagement Elements that continue to delight and motivate students, taking math learning to the next level of fun and interactivity.
- Ongoing lesson updates and new lessons for Grades 6–8 over the longer term to better directly align with middle school curriculum as well as educator experience improvements to support teaching routines.
With these updates, we’re excited to support teachers and administrators with tools that elevate their dedicated work, improve classroom outcomes, and cultivate a love for learning.
Together, we can make middle school math a place where students not only succeed— but thrive.
To learn more about how DreamBox can take your math instruction to the next level, visit our back-to-school landing page or reach out to a member of our team.
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]]>The post Explore the New DreamBox Math Curriculum Guide appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>By giving educators the tools they need to connect instruction, address gaps, and foster enrichment, DreamBox is helping schools and districts create a lasting impact on student outcomes.
We’re excited to announce the release of our all-new interactive Curriculum Guide! Designed with educators in mind, this interactive guide empowers teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators to connect DreamBox lessons to classroom instruction like never before. Whether you’re looking to solidify classroom connections, gain familiarity with lessons and lesson progressions, or align with state standards, the new curriculum guide has you covered.
Reinforcing Classroom Connections
At DreamBox, we know that the best math instruction happens when it’s deeply tied to what’s being taught in real classrooms. That’s why our Curriculum Guide is built to make those connections seamless. Teachers can now filter and sort lessons by DreamBox Learning Units or by their state standards, enabling educators to see the full breadth and depth of lesson coverage in DreamBox Math.
Increased Flexibility for Teachers
Teachers want to spend less time navigating tools and more time inspiring students. With unprecedented visibility into lesson groups and individual lessons, you can confidently align DreamBox to your instructional goals. Whether students are just starting on a concept, in progress, or reviewing, you can easily find a lesson to support getting them to the next level. This flexibility makes it easier than ever to pre-teach concepts, provide intervention or enrichment, and support small-group instruction.
What’s New in the DreamBox Curriculum Guide?
The Curriculum Guide is an essential tool for any educator looking to enhance their teaching with DreamBox Math. Whether you’re complementing your curriculum, supporting a struggling student, or challenging advanced learners, DreamBox has the perfect lesson for every scenario.
1. Scope & Sequence of Lessons Made Transparent
Navigate the full breadth and depth of DreamBox’s curriculum with ease. You’ll have clear insight into the progression of lessons and how they evolve to support complex math concepts.
2. Smart, Intuitive Filters
Quickly find the exact lesson you need by filtering by:
- Grade Level
- State Standards
- DreamBox Learning Unit Domains
3. Standards Alignment at a Glance
Every lesson tile includes clear alignment to state standards, so you can connect DreamBox lessons directly to your instructional core without skipping a beat.
4. Lesson Previews
Preview individual lessons for planning, whether you’re preparing for small-group instruction or one-on-one intervention. You’ll gain insights into how lessons engage students and how the adaptive platform personalizes tasks for their needs.
Take a Deeper Look Inside DreamBox
With DreamBox’s adaptive progression, our lessons meet students where they are and move them toward mastery. Our math curriculum is built to reflect the dynamic process of learning while encouraging students to transfer prior learning. This curriculum guide enables educators to explore our lessons by domain, across three unique lesson types.
Lesson Types & Progression:
- Exploring & Sensemaking: Students explore math concepts and reflect on their understanding, making connections to foundational skills.
- Looking for Structure & Relationships: Lessons identify key mathematical structures and relationships to deepen conceptual understanding.
- Fluency, Application & Procedural Skills: Students practice and apply procedural skills with confidence, progressing toward fluency.
This intentional progression ensures that every student builds a strong mathematical foundation, regardless of where their learning begins.
Classroom Applications of DreamBox Lessons:
With the Curriculum Guide, you can:
- Enhance instruction with lessons that align directly to your classroom goals.
- Pre-teach or reinforce concepts by targeting specific standards or skills.
- Support small-group or 1-on-1 instruction, demonstrating lessons based on students’ progress toward proficiency.
Assignments and feedback tools are also on the way—stay tuned!
Why This Matters for Educators
DreamBox’s Adaptive Personalization ensures every lesson is tailored to each student’s unique needs. The new DreamBox Curriculum Guide doesn’t just support teaching; it empowers educators to confidently integrate technology into their classrooms. Here’s what it offers at a glance:
- Discover thousands of lessons for grades K-8 aligned with your state’s standards and instructional goals.
- Gain unprecedented visibility into the scope, sequence, and alignment of DreamBox lessons.
- Identify and preview lessons to plan for targeted support to meet your students where they are, and ensure every learner has the opportunity to succeed.
- Get a clearer understanding of the lessons recommended in students’ personalized learning paths and identify lessons to assign and support deeper curricular connections.
Building Connections for Educators
We’ve added this capability to DreamBox Math based on the feedback we’ve heard from our partners and we’re super excited of what’s coming soon, like the ability to assign personalized lessons from the Curriculum Guide.
Plus, this new foundation will allow us to continue gathering invaluable feedback from you, our amazing educators. Together, we’ll keep building what every teacher and every student needs to achieve math excellence.
Experience the Curriculum Guide Today
We’re thrilled to bring you this new tool, and we can’t wait to hear how it transforms the way you teach math. Log into your DreamBox account today to explore the Curriculum Guide—and get ready to experience a whole new level of teaching excellence.
Don’t have an account yet? Start your free trial and see what’s possible with DreamBox. Together, we can inspire a lifelong love of learning in math.
Happy teaching,
The DreamBox Team
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]]>The post Cultivating a Caring Classroom Community appeared first on Discovery Education.
]]>In case you missed it, this year’s DEN Summer Institute (DENSI) was held on July 18 and 19. DENSI is a one-of-a-kind, community focused, professional learning experience exclusive for DEN STAR educators! Jessie Erickson, a DEN Leadership Council member, held one DENSI session to share her tips, tricks, and advice for building a strong classroom community. Read on to learn more about Jessie’s take on how Discovery Education resources can be used to help your students get to know each other, create meaningful connections, and grow as individuals.
Jessie R. Erickson, Ed. S.
Jessie is a recently retired K-8 classroom educator, who taught a variety of subjects and grade levels during her 34 years in education. She is a DEN Leadership Council member, ISTE Community Leader, reading specialist, and professional learning facilitator.
Introductions
The first step to building connections with your students is getting to know them and allowing them to get to know you! Students can feel nervous in the first few days of school, especially if they don’t know others in the class. Here are a few of my favorite ways to help us get to know each other:
- 3 truths, 1 lie: This conversation strategy can help us share facts we may not know about each other! Help make students more comfortable with sharing their information by capturing their Three Truths and a Lie on a Studio Board with pictures, text, and decorated in their favorite colors. The Studio Board serves as a virtual representation and might offer hints or throw off the class when it comes to determining which “fact” is actually a lie!
- Tabletop Texting: This strategy gets conversation going in a quiet way! You can set up chart paper around the room with questions and have students rotate to answer the questions, build on each other’s answers, and “discuss” the topics silently. As you move past introductions, I’ve also used this strategy to celebrate students by putting a sheet of paper on one student’s desk and having everyone share things they love about that student—what a great way to start your day!
- Conga Line: This strategy works in gym class, math class, really any group setting! We can put on fun music, ask questions about our classroom, school, or community, and rotate through partners to have conversations with new classmates.
Helping Our Students be Healthy, Well, and Mindfully Ready
To make academic progress students have to use the right mindset!
International Dot Day is Friday, September 15, and is a great reminder that we all leave a mark! At our campus, we celebrate Dot Day by having every student leave a dot on a bulletin board, and those dots create a huge, colorful tree to show we all made our mark.
The NBA and WNBA Stronger Together Series highlights athletes who share their mindset, how to be stronger, and how that helps their team! It’s a great community-building conversation where we can talk about how a positive mindset can help us all move forward, learn, and grow.
#MyYoungerSelf and #WeThriveInside are both wonderful resources from the Child Mind Institute for students in grades 3-12.
- #MyYoungerSelf offers messages about what you’d tell your younger self if you could talk to them today. Our middle school and high school students write letters to their younger selves, and we share them in our elementary hallways with a picture of the writer from a younger grade. It’s a fun activity for the older students to serve as leaders and it gives our younger students motivation and someone to look up to.
- #WeThriveInside is about what you do to get through stressful situations or times when you’re feeling less than your best. Some of us struggle with anxiety, like famous actress Emma Stone, who talks about how she works through anxiety even when she’s in front of a camera! It’s motivational for the students to learn from others, especially people they see on TV that might have them think, “Oh, what problems could they possibly have? They’re a movie star!”
For students in grades K-3, the Get Along Monsters are great to create student discourse! I set up a breakout game that will cause some sort of conflict for students to work through, and when the game is finished, we circle back to the Get Along Monsters to have conversations around the following questions:
- How do we get along with each other?
- How do we handle anger?
- How do we talk through our emotions?
- What do we say to each other when we don’t like what the other person said about us?
These cute, short, animated videos are a great resource for these conversations, and the kids are usually singing along by the end!
Stuff You Should Know is one of my favorite podcasts of all time! There are episodes covering social-emotional, mental health, and wellness topics, and the hosts have a great mindset. This podcast is meant for middle school and high school students, and the episodes about fear, jealousy, hate, and anger are very relevant for students in these age groups.
Virtual Field Trips
Not only are Virtual Field Trips exciting ways to bring new experiences into your classroom, but there are also great options to create learning moments around wellness, friendship, self-esteem, and happiness.
This Virtual Field Trip covers how to work with others, establish friendships, and build relationships. It has resources you can use with the whole class, as well as components for home use so parents and caregivers can get involved. These resources teach kids they are in control of their own emotions, which is important when we consider how we affect our community.
These amazing resources cover how we treat others by celebrating, not penalizing, differences. Last year we paired these resources with an assembly at our middle school! We invited two Holocaust survivors to share their experiences, which was an amazing, eye-opening experience for students in grades 6-9.
My students love Amazing Me and so do I! This Virtual Field Trip is all about self-esteem. We love to tie in some of our positive messages from the lessons into our bulletin boards, like “We Got This Wednesday!” where we select someone to give a positive affirmation in the classroom that day. There are so many wonderful ideas in Amazing Me, and great SOS strategies built right in!
This content is typically meant for middle school, but on our K-8 campus, it’s important I can extend the learning to help all students. For elementary, we focus on what makes us happy, what happiness is, and how to help make each other happy. We do our happy dance, then we program our Dash robot to dance, too! Our middle school students complete the entire VFT and have conversations about synonyms and antonyms, words in foreign languages, and create some bulletin boards. We havea great time making it cross-curricular!
Reflecting on Feelings
A caring community is there to celebrate when things are fun and also help motivate you during tough times.Here are a few of my favorite resources to help students build a caring community:
- Introduce mindfulness with the Inner Explorer Channel. These K-12 resources helps students get started with mindfulness and think about where we are together as a classroom. You can do the activities individually or as class, but they are all ready to grab and go from that channel. If you don’t have it bookmarked yet, be sure to do so!
- Make sure your classroom is inclusive for all students with the La Golda series. These videos can help support conversations about inclusion in both English and Spanish! The videos celebrate that we all come to the table with differences, and it also works through some handicapping conditions. For instance, if we’re in a wheelchair, how may we feel different than our peers?
- Encourage students to write about their emotions with writing prompts. Even if I don’t use the prompt as written, it’s a great place to start for some inspiration! I’ve copied and pasted some of them, created my own slide deck, pushed them out through Google classroom assignments—whatever I need to do to get my students writing and sharing!
- Use music and images to reset the energy in your classroom. Try searching DE for sound effects, songs, brain breaks, images, or whatever sets the right tone in your classroom. Whether you want to calm the class down or get everyone excited, there is media in DE to match your energy!
Favorite SOS Strategies
These Marzano and McREL supported strategies are great for student engagement and building community! They’re often built into Discovery Education lessons, but you can also add your own spin on them. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Who Are You? This strategy makes a great reflection moment. Using pictures of animals or emojis can help you check in with students multiple times a day!
- Get Your Thinking Hat On! This strategy helps students evaluate content through a specific perspective. Each “hat” offers students a specific perspective to keep in mind as they watch a video. Students then write their response with that perspective in mind, helping them open their minds to other people’s perspectives. Then students share their perspectives to come to a consensus on what they watched!
- Multiple Perspectives. This is a great way for students to think about someone else’s perspective. We use one of the great images and videos from DE and ask students to put themselves into the shoes of someone shown to help them connect with their perspective and build empathy.
- They Said What? We use this strategy in Social Studies, but it can also be used for health and wellness! This strategy asks students to evaluate a picture and consider what someone would be saying in that moment. To inspire some community-strengthening conversations, you could share an image of two students getting along or two students who seem to be arguing. Then ask questions like:
- What do you think they are saying to each other?
- What could make this situation better?
- What could escalate the situation?
Classroom Journals with Studio
Let’s flip the switch on Studio! Last year I visited some classrooms who held class meetings to have conversations and establish norms, but they wanted a way for students to reflect on those conversations and bring in images or video. With Studio, students can make their own slides, so we turned that into their classroom journal. We had every student make a classroom journal 2 years ago and interest has continued to spread!
Once teachers saw that students could borrow images from Discovery Education or upload their own images to add to their slides, we were suddenly using Studio as a way for students to collect all their learning and thoughts in their journal. We’ve had students create slides to answer different journal prompts, like asking students to capture what they’re grateful for with pictures and text. These prompts send students on a scavenger hunt within DE to find images, while also writing their ideas and reflections.
Finding More Resources
You can find lots of videos on creating classroom community by searching for activities that align to any topic you’re looking for. I’ll search for mindfulness, gratitude, relationships, community—just type a word into the search bar in Discovery Education Experience, select your grade level band, and then sort out the types of resources. Select “activities” or “videos” to find exactly what you need for your classroom and your students. As teachers, we all know the temperature of our classroom. We know when we’re having good days, we know when we’re having bad days, and we know by watching our students what we need to teach next!
One of the first things you do in a new school year is look at your classroom and decorate it! Set up bulletin boards, lay down your classroom rug, then it’s time to think about how to make your classroom community beautiful too! Plan to get to know your students, set up your classroom norms and expectations, and build relationships with students! Discovery Education has a lot of support to help you start this journey and build a welcoming classroom community.
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