Effective Maths Warm ups

Today we had Marie Hirst in school helping us with our PD on Maths. Our focus was Effective Maths Warm ups that included Daily Maths. Picture number talks, Odd one out, Solve emoji and Same but different to name a few.  

My New Entrant class will be starting soon, and so my focus on oral language and incorporating the 'talk' into my Maths programme more, lends itself to the same but different task and number talks.  I am also considering how I have done my Maths Calendar work in the past and how by simplifying the Daily Maths Wall initially, how we could build a strong knowledge on number. 

My second train of thought was HOW AM I GOING TO SUPPORT TEACHERS IN MY SYNDICATE WITH INCORPORATING THESE ACTIVITIES INTO THEIR OWN CLASSES. 

one way to assist teachers could be to ask each teacher to share at team meeting one warmup they have tried, what worked, what didnt, how did they adapt and or extend it for their learners and digital capabilities. 

Learning/ Aha moments:

Remember that every moment is a teachable moment. Using the correct terminology sets our learners up for success,

Ramblings/ Rumblings

How to effectively us maths warmup for maintenance,  reasoning,  maths talk,  and fluency.

 

Tapasa

Tapasa is a cultural competency framework for teachers of pacific children. Some important aspects that I have learnt through this PD run by Jeremy:

The Va - the sacred connection between people. Love, Service, family and spirituality.

Jeremy suggested we use this language with parents: The Va : I want to establish the va with you OR the purpose of this meeting is to establish the va. In Samoan can you also say Tauhi va.

Tapasa is all about:

* Cultural confidence

* Connections

* Culture

* Consistency

* Collaboration / collabor action.

My goal is to use this language more with Pacific Island families. 

 

Maths PLD

Today was my first day of having to work with a facilitator and the principal in outlining a plan to implement a professional development plan for the school. The process helped me focus on what I believe the fundamental ideas and foundations in Maths are that will help our learners achieve accelerated shift as well as improve and develop a positive attitude towards mathematics for both teachers and learners. 

This reaffirmed the importance of building strong relationships and knowing, in this case, the staff as well as our learners. The right fit, the right product, the right motivation, the right balance. I look forward to not only working closely with Marie Hirst but also learning from her.

 

New role, new teacher

This term sees me stepping away from the classroom and supporting an experienced teacher, new to New Zealand in navigating the New Zealand curriculum and embrace the Manaiakalani Cluster pedagogy of Learn, Create and Share. 

Balancing learning to get to know the curriculum as well as assisting with learning how to use technology on a daily basis is not an easy task. My main focus is to show the important must know items first. This is to ensure that daily communication and administration can be completed and everyone is always in the know about what is happening. I will also be working through the the google educator certification with the new to NZ teacher. 

        

DFI session 6

Todays session was facilitated by Dorothy and focussed on Enabling Access and being Connected.

Connected: To be digitally connected means we need to have open and visible teaching and learning. While we love connecting with others in the cluster as well as other teachers face to face, this is not always possible. Being from a community who shares ideas and knowledge frequently, time constariants can be overcome when we use the affordances of technology. We are able to use our sites and drive to share ideas and our teaching with learners, parents and colleagues.
To successfully implement our kaupapa we must be visible.

Today I learnt about Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu. This simply means write to me, write to others. I want to explore this more in following weeks as my learners are growing in confidence in sharing their learning on their blogs. How amazing would it be for our learners to connect with other learners across the country.

Enabling Access:
Leading on from being connected, we had the opportunity to explore various sites within cluster. It was interesting to see the difference and to note how we could improve on our own sites. Dorothy took this a step further by having us share our site and provide feedback for others. It was a valuable experience as we were able to see some simple errors such as broken links, work not visible or how we have far to much information on our pages.
While I love my site and have found that it is easy for New Entrants to navigate, there were some issues with broken links. We then had the time to fix, change or include information on our sites that we deemed important or had missed doing before.

This is the landing/ home page of my site.

Having my colleagues give feedback helped me realise how I can improve on my slide decks as well as the importance of having the lens of a parent and what a parent might like to see on our class sites.
For the learners I believe my sight is appealing and allows me to respond to the diverse needs, urges and experiences I have within my class thus engaging all learners.

Learning/ AHA moments
* Remember that learners, parents and colleagues view the site.

Ramblings / Rumblings
* How can I make my set more multimodal?
* When making a site and adding to slide decks I should keep these in mind:

Teacher as Inquirer

My Inquiry Focus for this year is based on the School Entry Assessment Data. Below I have analysed the data and have noticed the lack of skills that will be required to achieve and make shift in learning across all curriculum areas. It is evident that there is a lack of basic alphabet, word and phonemic knowledge.

I have thus decided to use this information to help form my inquiry question:

If explicit strategies are explored and taught for phonics and oral language, will accelerated shift occur in other learning areas?

My initial thoughts are that if I use phonics and alphabet knowledge as a basis, could I get learners to respond to text more?

How can I transfer the social skills learnt through learning through play into thinking and sharing when explicitly teaching?

How can I interweave the gifting of language that occurs at Flying Fives more into phonics, reading and writing? 

Looking at these questions they seem more like seperate inquiry questions. I am willing and eager to track the progress of my changed practice and how they affect and help learners achieve accelerated learning. 

Alignment with the Manaiakalani Achievement Challenge:  

I am also interested in seeing if the focus on oral language helps learners share their thinking and ideas in Writing and Maths.

DFI Session 5

A day of exploring and revisiting skills that I knew but do not used regularly due to making a class site once a year.
The morning started with the importance of being visible. This is such an integral part of who we are as Manaiakalani. It reminded me of the importance of helping learners understand the difference between what we are doing and what we are learning and ensuring that there are no 'surprises'.

Doing Vs learning:
We are doing maths. We are learning to count backwards from 5 to 0 using materials.

Gerhard and Dorothy shared lots of ideas and ways we are able to make this possible in our classrooms for not only our learners but also for our wider school community and parents.
Manaiakalani schools have visibility as one of our foundation principles and we make this possible by having visible sites and visible learning. By using our Hapara dashboard, we can also provide parents access to their child's learning through the parent portal in the now (as the learner is working).

Google Class on Air is another way Manaiakalani makes teaching and the LEARN visible to other teachers i.e. colleague to colleague. I had the privilege of being accepted into 2018 Manaiakalani Google Class on Air programme but due to unforeseen circumstances could not fulfil this role. I am hoping to reapply and take up this fabulous opportunity again one day.

Today I enjoyed making sites and buttons. It was great having the time to gather content to create multimodal sites for our inquiry topic next term. I was able to link my Learning Through Play pd with the multi modal learning and multi modal literacies by thinking about my learners 'urges' and creating pages that would appeal to all the learners and provide them with the opportunity to choose how they want to learn.

The importance of planning ahead was reinforced and ensuring that the we have the intended audience in mind as we create the site. a site for  anew Entrant class would look vastly different to a site for a college student. However to extend and accelerate learners we need to ensure we have content that will enhance their learning and that they are able to access when and how they need it....not waiting on the teacher to say tell them when to watch a video clip.

This is my Space multimodal site in progress. A link to the completed site can be found here.

Learning/ AHA moments.
* Instead of creating slides for Inquiry, create an Inquiry topic multimodal site and allow learners to use the urges to Learn, Create and Share.

Ramblings/ Rumblings
* Could I assist Year 3 learners in using the site and then making an EE to create and share?