Illustrative Mathematics is a problem based curriculum. This means your students will spend time investigating the topics and discussing what they are learning. Your students will be involved in th mathematics for 42 min a day. Each lesson contains a warm up, lesson activitie(s), a lesson synthesis, and a cool down. I will use the cool downs as a formative assessment. Formative assessment means it will be graded and yet weighted zero in the grade book. The grades will come from summative assessments. As in the past if a student does not earn the score they want they will be allowed to retake the test. They will have to come in for reteaching before they retest.