Amplify Desmos Math California
Welcome, Reviewers to Amplify Desmos Math California!
The video on the right will walk you through program navigation and how to access key features.
Click the sections below to find navigation tips and more program information as you explore materials from each grade.
Digital access
- Locate the Digital Access flyer from your Reviewer Binder.
- Click the orange button below to access the digital platform.
- Click login with Amplify.
- Enter the username and password provided on your Digital Access flyer.
Navigation tips
Below you will find helpful tips for navigating Amplify Desmos Math California. We recommend reading these pages alongside the program’s print materials and digital experience to gain a deeper understanding of the program.
Designed for California
The Amplify Desmos Math California program is grounded in the ambitious vision articulated in the California Mathematics Framework to enable all California students to become powerful users of mathematics in order to better understand and impact the world (Framework pg. 3). Our program incorporates the latest research in student learning, meaning that we:
- Focus on the Big Ideas. Amplify Desmos Math California’s courses, units, and lessons are centered around the Big Ideas. Big Ideas, like standards, are not considered in isolation. In addition to each unit and lesson’s focal Big Ideas, Amplify Desmos Math California also provides connections among the Big Ideas across units and lessons.
- Center on open and engaging tasks. Amplify Desmos Math California is grounded in engaging tasks meant to address students’ often-asked question: “Why am I learning this?” Students are invited into learning with low-floor, high-ceiling tasks that provide an entry point for all. Open tasks in Amplify Desmos Math California provide the space for students to try on multiple strategies and represent their thinking in different ways, and allow student explanation and discussion to serve as the center of the classroom. All lessons offer both print and digital representations of lessons.
- Provide enhanced digital experiences. Amplify Desmos Math California includes digitally-enhanced lesson activities, incorporating interactive digital tools alongside print materials. These purposefully-placed resources allow students to visualize mathematical concepts, receive actionable feedback while practicing, encounter personalized learning support from an onscreen tutor, and engage in discussions about their thinking and approaches.
- Treat core instruction & differentiation as integral partners. The Amplify Desmos Math California curriculum provides teachers with lessons, strategies, and resources to eliminate barriers and increase access to grade-level content without reducing the mathematical demand of tasks. Every activity has multiple entry points to ensure that all students are supported and challenged. Intervention and personalized learning activities are directly connected to lesson content and offer students the individualized support they need to be successful.
Unpacking materials
A key step in the review process will be identifying and organizing the physical components that have been delivered to you. Linked here, you will find a list of physical resources to expect to receive for Algebra 1. A copy of the materials inventory checklist can also be found in your reviewer binder.
Program components
Amplify Desmos Math California integrates a blend of print and digital resources. The program includes the following print components:
- Teacher Edition (two volumes)
- Student Edition (two volumes)
- Math Language Development Resources
- Intervention, Extension, and Investigations Resources
- Assessment Resources
- Additional Practice (Teacher Resources)
- Additional Practice (Student Workbook)
Category 1: Mathematics Content/Alignment with the Standards
Standards Maps
Linked here is the Standards Map for Amplify Desmos Math California for Algebra 1.
Evaluation Criteria Map
Linked here is the Evaluation Criteria Map for Amplify Desmos Math California Algebra 1.
California Common Core State Standards for Mathematics
The linked here is the alignment of Amplify Desmos Math California to the California Common Core State Standards for Algebra 1.
Drivers of Investigation, Standards for Mathematical Practice, and Content Connections
The Why, How, and What of Engaging Students in Mathematical Tasks
The Drivers of Investigation are intended to spark student curiosity and motivate students to engage with mathematics by providing compelling reasons to care about the work of mathematics. The 3 Drivers of Investigation – (DI1) make sense of the world, (DI2) predict what could happen, and (DI3) impact the future – work in conjunction with the 8 Standards for Mathematical Practice and the 4 Content Connections.
In Amplify Desmos Math California, students investigate how mathematical concepts come to life in intriguing and authentic real-world and mathematical contexts. These investigations are provided throughout the year through open and authentic tasks of varying durations – through lesson activities, unit-level Explore lessons, and longer course-level Investigations. Each lesson and investigation is grounded around the why, how, and what of the learning experience.
The linked here is the alignment of Amplify Desmos Math California to the Standards for Mathematical Practice at Algebra 1.
California English Language Development Standards
Linked here is the alignment of Amplify Desmos Math California to the California English Language Development Standards for Algebra 1.
California Environmental Principles and Concepts
Select lessons, performance tasks, and investigations across grade levels in Amplify Desmos Math California are aligned to one or more of the California Environmental Principles and Concepts. Click this link to view how the California Environmental Principles and Concepts are represented in Amplify Desmos Math California Algebra 1.
Category 2: Program Organization
Amplify Desmos Math thoughtfully combines conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application. Each lesson is designed to tell a story by posing problems that invite a variety of approaches before guiding students to synthesize their understanding of the learning goals.
Big Ideas
Amplify Desmos Math California’s courses, units, and lessons are centered around the Big Ideas. In addition to each unit and lesson’s focal Big Ideas, Amplify Desmos Math California also provides connections among the Big Ideas across units and lessons. Please refer to Keeping the Big Ideas at the Center, linked here, to view the program lesson design and alignment at Algebra 1.
Proficiency Progression
Lessons and units in Amplify Desmos Math are designed around a Proficiency Progression, a model that steps out problem-based learning by systematically building students’ curiosity into lasting grade-level understanding.
In the Proficiency Progression, lessons begin by activating students’ natural curiosity and offering opportunities to generate new ideas through collaboration. Teachers are then able to refine ideas through intentional facilitation and guide students to grade-level understanding, while students retain the ability to use different strategies and methods to show their comprehension of the content. Students are provided ample opportunities to develop lasting understanding.
Lesson design
Amplify Desmos Math is designed with a structured approach to problem-based learning that systematically builds on students’ curiosity and allows students to grapple with the Big Ideas of the California Framework. Every lesson activity is organized into a Launch, Monitor, Connect format.
| Launch The launch is a short, whole-class conversation that creates a need or excitement, provides clarity, or helps students connect to their prior knowledge or personal experience, which ensures that everyone has access to the upcoming work. |
Monitor As students work individually, in pairs, or in groups, teachers explore student thinking, ask questions, and provide support to help move the conversations closer to the intended math learning goal. |
Connect Teachers connect students’ ideas to the key learning goals of the lesson, facilitating class discussions that help students synthesize and solidify the big ideas. |
Routines
Instructional routines can be found throughout each lesson in the Teacher Edition and digital Presentation Screens. Math Language Routines (MLRs) are used within lessons to highlight student-developed language and ideas, cultivate conversation, support mathematical sense-making, and promote meta-cognition. Here is a list of the instructional routines used in the Amplify Desmos Math curriculum:
- MLR1: Stronger and Clearer Each Time
- MLR2: Collect and Display
- MLR3: Critique, Correct, Clarify
- MLR5: Co-Craft Questions
- MLR6: Three Reads
- MLR7: Compare and Connect
- Decide and Defend
- Notice and Wonder
- Number Talk
- Tell a Story
- Think-Pair-Share
- Which One Doesn’t Belong?
Program structure
Amplify Desmos Math combines the best of problem-based lessons, intervention, and assessments into a coherent and engaging experience for both students and teachers.
Lesson structure
Each lesson within Amplify Desmos Math follows the same structure.
| Warm-Up |
| Every Amplify Desmos Math lesson begins with a whole-class Warm-Up. Warm-Ups are an invitational Instructional Routine intended to provide a social moment at the start of the lesson in which every student has an opportunity to contribute. Warm-Ups may build fluency or highlight a strategy that may be helpful in the current lesson or act as an invitation into the math of the lesson. |
| Lesson Activities |
| Each lesson includes one or two activities. These activities are the heart of each lesson. Students notice, wonder, explore, calculate, predict, measure, explain their thinking, use math to settle disputes, create challenges for their classmates, and more. Guidance is provided to help teachers launch, monitor, and connect student thinking over the course of the activity. |
| Synthesis and Show What You Know |
| The Synthesis is an opportunity for the teacher and students to pull all the learning of the lesson together into a lesson takeaway. Students engage in a facilitated discussion to consolidate and refine their ideas about the learning goals, and the teacher synthesizes students’ learning. Show What You Know is a daily assessment opportunity for students to show what they know about the learning goals and what they are still learning. |
| Practice & Differentiation |
| Daily practice problems for the day’s lesson are included both online and in the print Student Edition, including fluency, test practice, and spiral review. |
Scope and sequence
Below you can view the scope and sequence for Algebra 1.
Category 3: Assessments
A variety of performance data in Amplify Desmos Math provides evidence of student learning. Beyond formative, summative, and benchmark assessments, students also have opportunities to for self-reflection with Watch Your Knowledge Grow. Students take ownership of their learning by reflecting and tracking their progress before and after each unit.
Unit-level assessment
Amplify Desmos Math has embedded unit assessments that offer key insights into students’ conceptual understanding of math. These assessments provide regular, actionable information about how students are thinking about and processing math, with both auto-scoring and in-depth rubrics that help teachers anticipate and respond to students’ learning needs.
Each unit (grades 2–8), begins with an assessment designed to identify the student skills that will be particularly relevant to the upcoming unit. This check is agnostic to the standards covered in the following unit and serves not as a deficit-based acknowledgment of what students do not know, but rather as an affirmation of the knowledge and skills with which students come in.
Students engage with rigorous grade-level mathematics through a variety of formats and tasks in the End-of-Unit Assessment. A combination of autoscored and rubric-scored items provide deep insights into student thinking. All Amplify Desmos Math End-of-Unit Assessments include two forms.
Sub-Unit Quizzes are embedded regularly throughout Algebra 1. In these checks, students are assessed on a subset of conceptual understandings from the unit, with rubrics that help illuminate students’ current understanding and provide guidance for responding to student thinking.
Lesson-level assessments
Amplify Desmos Math lessons include daily moments of assessment provide valuable evidence of learning for both the teacher and student.
Each lesson has a daily formative assessment focused on one of the key concepts in the lesson. Show What You Know moments are carefully designed to minimize completion time for students while maximizing daily teacher insights to attend to student needs during the following class.
Teachers have the ability to see and provide in-the-moment feedback as students progress through a digital lesson. Responsive Feedback motivates students and engages them in the learning process.
Performance tasks
At the end of each unit there is a summative assessment performance task provided to evaluate students’ proficiency with the concepts and skills addressed in the unit.
Benchmark Assessments
mCLASS Math Benchmark Assessments are powerful digital assessments administered to the whole class for benchmarking. Amplify Desmos Math California Algebra 1 includes a beginning-of-year/readiness screener. The assessment is designed with a focus on analyzing student responses to reveal underlying math thinking, evaluate what students know about grade-level math, and inform instructional decisions.
CASSPP-aligned assessment preparation
Amplify Desmos Math California includes a CAASPP-aligned Item Bank. This standards-aligned bank of questions allows teachers to filter and search by grade and standard to find items. Once assigned on the digital platform, students will experience CAASPP-like practice with the online digital tools.
Data and reporting
Amplify Desmos Math provides teachers and administrators with unified reporting and insights so that educators have visibility into what students know about grade-level math—and can plan instruction accordingly for the whole class, small groups, and individual students. Reporting functionality integrates unit assessments, lesson assessments, personalized learning, benchmark assessments, and progress monitoring for a comprehensive look at student learning. Program reports show proficiency and growth by domain, cluster, standard, and priority concept using performance data from unit assessments, then highlight areas of potential student need to allow teachers to modify their instruction and target differentiated support.
Administrator reporting provides a complete picture of student, class, and district performance, allowing administrators to implement instructional and intervention plans.
Category 4: Access and Equity
The Amplify Desmos Math California curriculum provides teachers with lessons, strategies, and resources to eliminate barriers and increase access to grade-level content without reducing the mathematical demand of tasks. Our lessons are developed using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to proactively ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.
Every activity has multiple entry points to ensure that all students are supported and challenged. Intervention and personalized learning activities are directly connected to the day’s content and offer students the individualized supports they need to be successful.
Each lesson and unit contains guidance for teachers on how to identify students who may need support, students who need to keep strengthening their understanding, and students who may be ready to stretch their learning. In addition, teachers are provided with recommendations for resources to use with each group of students.
Universal Design for Learning
Each lesson in the program incorporates opportunities for engagement, representation, action, and expression based on the guidelines of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
- Multiple Means of Engagement: Students engage in both print and digital learning, and are regularly participating in discussions and hands-on activities. Students are invited to build their own challenge for other students to solve, which provides opportunities for choice and
autonomy, as well as joy and play.
- Multiple Means of Representation: Students are encouraged to demonstrate their learning using mathematical representations, both print and digital, and regularly engage with their peers in analyzing multiple possible solutions. Classes engage in open-ended discussions about what individual students notice and wonder about mathematical concepts.
- Multiple Means of Action and Expression: Learners differ in how they navigate learning environments and express what they know. Students can communicate their ideas in multiple ways, including in print, sketching, uploading photos, or recording an audio response.
Accessibility
Lesson Facilitation Supports
Every lesson includes at least one specific suggestion the teacher can use to increase access to the lesson without reducing the mathematical demand of the tasks. These suggestions address the following areas:
- Conceptual Processing
- Visual-Spatial Processing
- Executive Functioning
- Memory and Attention
- Fine Motor Skills
Accessibility Tools
Students have the ability to control accessibility tools so that each learning experience is customized to their individual needs. In many instances, these tools can be turned on or off at any point of instruction.
- Text to speech: Reads text instructions to students in multiple languages.
- Enlarged font: Increases the size of all text on screen.
- Braille mode: Includes narration of digital interactions.
- Language selection: Toggles between languages.
Differentiation: In-lesson teacher moves
Within every lesson activity, teachers can use the Differentiation Teacher Moves suggestions to provide in-the-moment instructional support while students are engaged in the work of the lesson. This table can help teachers anticipate the ways students may approach the activity, and provides prompts that they can use during the lesson to Support, Strengthen, and Stretch individual students in their thinking. Teachers are provided with clear student actions and understanding to look for, each matched with immediately usable suggestions for how to respond to the student thinking illustrated in each row of the table. In addition to using these suggestions in the moment as teachers monitor student work, teachers can review the Differentiation table in advance to help them anticipate how students are likely to approach the activity.
Differentiation: Beyond the lesson
Teachers are provided with recommendations for resources to use with each group of students needing support, strengthening, and stretching after each lesson. Support, Strengthen, and Stretch resources include:
- Mini-Lessons: 15-minute, small-group direct instruction lessons targeted to a specific concept or skill.
- Item Banks: Space for teachers to create practice and assessments by using filters and searching for standards, summative-style items, and more.
- Fluency Practice: Adaptive, personalized practice built out for basic operations and more.
- Extensions: Lesson-embedded teacher moves including possible stretch questions and activities for students.
- Lesson Practice: Additional practice problems support every lesson.
- Math Adventures: Strategy-based math games where students engage with math concepts and practice skills in a fun digital environment.
- Lesson Summary Support: Support for students and caregivers that provides efficient explanation of the learning goal with clear examples.
Math identity and community
The Math Identity and Community feature supports teachers in helping students build confidence in their own mathematical thinking, develop skills to work with and learn from others when doing math, and learn how math is an interwoven part of their broader community. Teachers will find brief prompts integrated throughout the lessons that they can use to provide opportunities for all students to mathematize their world. This is especially important for students who may not see themselves as belonging in math or may not see math as belonging in their lives. Teachers can use the suggested prompts to broaden students’ ideas about what it means to be good at math, highlight the value of each student’s contributions, and to celebrate math class as a place for coming together to think in flexible, creative, and interesting ways. These habits of mind can help students engage with math joyfully and successfully both in and outside of math class. Here are some examples of the Math Identity and Community supports embedded in each lesson:
- I can be all of me in math class. You will work with partners every day in math class. What do you want your partners to know about you?
- We are a math community. What does good listening look like and sound like in a math community?
- I am a doer of math. What math strengths did you use today?
Math language development
Every lesson in Amplify Desmos Math includes opportunities for all students to develop mathematical language as they experience the content, while providing intentional support for multilingual/English Learners. Amplify Desmos Math purposefully progress language development from lesson to lesson and across units by supporting students in making their arguments and explanations stronger, clearer, and more precise. This systematic approach to the development of math language can be broken down into the following four categories of support:
- Vocabulary: Units and lessons start by surfacing students’ language for new concepts, then building connections between their language and the new vocabulary for that unit. This honors the language assets that students bring into their learning.
- Language Goals: Language goals attend to the mathematics students are learning, and are written through the lens of one or more of four language modalities: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
- Math Language Routines: Math Language Routines are used within lessons to highlight student-developed language and ideas, cultivate conversation, support mathematical sense-making, and promote meta-cognition.
- Multilingual/English Learner Supports: Supports for multilingual/English learners (ML/ELs) are called out at intentional points within each lesson. These specific, targeted suggestions support ML/ELs with modifications that increase access to a task, or through development of contextual or mathematical language (both of which can be supportive of all learners).
Multilingual and English Learner supports
Partnership with English Learner Success Forum
Amplify Desmos Math California is designed with guidance on multilingual/ English learner support for teachers provided by the English Learner Success Forum (ELSF). ELSF is a national nonprofit organization that advocates for high-quality instructional materials that are inclusive of multilingual learners. ELSF’s guiding documents reflect research-based instructional strategies that are critical to curriculum design and were created by researchers, linguists, and practitioners from across the country. ELSF reviewed our materials and provided directional guidance and feedback to ensure that the program fully supports multilingual/English learners.
Math Language Development Resource
Each lesson in the program features a parallel language activity, designed to be available to all students, in the form of teacher guidance and student activities. The activities in the Math Language Development Resources has leveled ELD (Emerging, Expanding, Bridging) differentiation to support all levels of English Learners. This approach ensures that all students, regardless of their language skills, can participate fully, grasp the material, and excel in their mathematical journey.
Multilingual Glossary
Amplify Desmos Math California includes a digital glossary for languages other than Spanish. Translations will be provided for up to nine languages.
Spanish Version
Amplify Desmos Math California will include a Spanish student facing materials beginning in the 2026–2027 school year.
Category 5: Instructional Planning and Support
Amplify Desmos Math California includes a variety of embedded instructional supports to empower teachers to lead effectively and gain actionable insights into student growth and progress. Teachers are equipped with a comprehensive set of resources designed to enhance their understanding and implementation of the program including:
- Navigating the Program Overview
- Scope and Sequence: Provides topics and pacing for the year.
- Unit Overview: Provides teachers guidance to started planning the upcoming unit (including pacing considerations).
- Sub-Unit Overview: Provides teachers with the goals and essential questions for the sub-unit.
- Sub-Unit Math That Matters Most: Illustrates for teachers the most important progressions of strategies, skills, or language that happening during the sub-unit.
- Lesson Overview: Orients teachers to the topic, standards, and key learning goals of the lesson.
- Lesson at a Glance: Describes the purpose and timing of each activity in the lesson, and guidance on student work setups.
- Differentiation: A comprehensive set of recommendations to Support, Strength, and Stretch student learning.
- Additional Practice Resources
- A blend of print and digital experiences, as well as manipulatives to support student engagement and learning
- Math Language Development Resources ancillary
- Intervention, Extension, and Investigation Resources ancillary
- Assessment Resources ancillary: Providing answer keys to all assessments and Show What You Know activities, and rubrics for sub-unit quizzes and end of unit assessments.