Mia's Teaching Journey

Friday 26 January 2018 - Roberta Hunter PD Day 1 ‘Developing Mathematical inquiry in a learning community’. Here are some notes I have taken from our amazing PD today with Roberta Hunter. Please  note some are taken from her slides. Maths that works for diverse learners - for all learners. Whole focus on an inquiry, children doing mathematics within an inquiry mind, thinking. There are so many places where children think it is their job to sit and listen. Children need to learn that to be good at maths they need to ask questions, children need to realise that it is their job to do their learning and thinking. A lot of children associate being bad at maths with being a ‘bad’ listener’, or ‘I can’t do maths because I fiddle all the time’. Someone to look at/ into - William Tait - Professor in the States - stats about life expectancy - if children disengaged from mathematics at age 10 their life expectancy became less. ** Cultural context - what do the children do in...

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 b...