Term 1 Inquiry Focus

After an amazing break travelling through Vietnam it is great to be back at work. I am really enjoying teaching my new level year 3 and I have an amazing class of beautiful tamariki. I am only in my room until the 2nd of June (week 5 of Term 2), as Laura Nalder will be returning for the rest of the year after her study leave. Taking this into consideration I want to focus my inquiry around something I can hopefully come to some sort of resolution for/ conclusion by end of this term.

 Although I haven’t done much maths in this first two weeks yet due to various time constraints and other things such as swimming etc taking up a big deal of time I have already noticed that a lack of knowledge is holding most of my children back and teaching them strategies seems to be a waste of time? Well perhaps not a waste but it seems like I am actually going back to teaching the knowledge because they don’t have what they need to work out the strategy.

 I need to investigate ways to build up knowledge and what knowledge actually needs to be built. I think that it is important that children have a sound understanding/ recall of basic facts, friends to 10 and doubles within 20 before moving on to part whole strategies, and this is something from just a few maths sessions I have realised the majority of the children are really lacking. I think Place Value is also very important, being able to break numbers down and actually say how many hundreds tens and ones are in any given number and be able to show say this and show it with materials. I believe moving too quickly into adding ones and tens is pointless until they have sound understanding of exactly what a 2-digit number is made out of e.g. 25 is 2 tens and 5 ones, 10 + 10 + 5. I would like to inquire into teaching almost one term of knowledge would have on children’s learning in T2. Would they be able to take to strategies more quickly and have better understanding of them more quickly? Provide context when teaching knowledge - e.g. here is the problem here is what he are going to be able to solve.

 So, to sum up all of that my Inquiry Focus for T1 2017 is : Would a term of a ‘Knowledge Blitz’ be beneficial before teaching strategies in Year 3 Maths? I look forward to sharing my findings with you

Mia :)

    

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