Mia's Teaching Journey

Language in Abundance - Where will you put your lens? Can you think with depth and breadth if you don't have the words to express yourself? 2/3 of a lot of our children's day does not expose them to complex language. Our challenge is to make sure the 6 hours we have with them is to expose to them to as much rich language as possible. We want our kids to do well in education to then step up and be 'higher players' in society, how do we get the parent and caregiver to be more educated? We know that education levels in the family are going to make a difference to their children - if we say there are a large number of families here that don't have higher education it doesn't mean they are NOT going to able to scaffold and help their children. You can't spend your day gathering ideas from the children. What are the trio of lens? - Explicit attention to language - Attention to co-contributors - Optimising envieonmental conditions Language carrie...

Making Maths Count Session 2: Getting Started and Number Knowledge Jo Knox, 10.4.18 What info do I want to collect, why do I want to collect it, and how am I going to use it? Jo gave us this piece of paper. She asked us to use to to colour a little picture of a teacher we were given and once we had done that we put our picture on the board. Our discussion is below. Looking at our data - what does it mean .. what are we going to do with it? No one in our group felt confident teaching maths, there seems to be an equal spattering of yellow and blue. At the moment it is a jumble of data.. What might we do to help ourselves out … sort them. Decided to start with confidence. What can we say from this? Half of us are lacking confidence.. Good that we didn’t say most, to say MOST it must be more than half!! We could say ‘more’. Time to look at assessment data. Is there number knowledge that they don’t have that is stopping them from getting the strategy? ...

After our second CoL meeting yesterday, I wanted to review my Inquiry thus far this term, I feel I need to have a look at my initial problem, re word my Inquiry question, officially identify my target group and come up with a way of how I am going to MEASURE my students progress. What is my problem: My children lack the mathematical language, needed to explain how they work out a problem. In addition, this means they find it difficult to understand what many word problems are asking them to do in the first place. What is my inquiry question: Would the everyday, explicit and rich teaching of mathematical language, coupled with step by step techniques of unpacking word problems, help my learners to better understand mathematical concepts, and better answer questions and explain how they got their answer? I feel like this has been more of the direction my inquiry has gone this term, although I am integrating a lot more strand I feel like it has become very clear that there ...

Community of Adult Learners  Visible, connected, empowered, ubiquitous “How can we come together and integrate our expertise and our knowledge to address significant problems?” Graeme Aitken Superficial Collaboration .. its knowing about each other passing through each others' lives but no deeply knowing each other. We are building on the amazing stuff that teachers are doing and collaborating in a way that is made possible through our ability to share what we are doing - Go Us! Manaiakalani - Using meta-analysis to identify what works If teachers are going to have a pedagogy thats going to make a difference to children, you need to understand what your goals are, and what difference you are going to make. If one of the things you want to achieve for example, is that  you want all of your learners to be interested in what they are doing in class, how are you going to show evidence that they are actually more engaged? 3 things you need to do as a...

I am going to be on camp this Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so before I go to camp I wanted to do a blog post explaining what I did in class on Friday to help with my research into my inquiry.    Would integrating the teaching of strand maths with number, help kids to better acquire key mathematical language, raising their achievement? I wanted to get a general idea where my class was at in terms of their understanding of key mathematical vocabulary. I as the teacher, from observations on a day to day basis know that the understanding and use of mathematical vocabulary in my class is poor, however doing a CoL inquiry this year I needed to have more sound data to prove this. I found a very simple vocabulary activity online and got my learners to complete it. It looked like this: The front of the sheet had a bank of words. They were: add, difference, divided by, combined, per, subtract, sum, times, minus, multiple, shared, increased by, plus, take away rat...

Kia Ora!! Happy Friday, it's been a busy week 5, gearing up for camp next week. I am looking forward to the weekend, and super excited about going on my first camp in my teaching career. Firstly I want to reflect on this week's first DMIC lesson I tried out with my learners. Please read my previous blog post if you haven't already, this gives you an intro into this lesson, and the pedagogy behind the DIMC maths Bobbi Hunter is guiding us through, with the goal of implementing this in our classes this year.  The question was:  On the weekend Mr Goodwin, Miss Parrant and Miss Szymanik practised putting up a tent. They started at 10:15 a.m. They each took one 7 minute turn.  How long did it take them to put up the tent? If they started putting up the tent at 10:15 a.m, what time did they finish? What did I consider when forming this question.  Is it relevant to the learner's lives?  YES, we are all going to camp next week, a lot of the childre...

Kia Ora, Talofa and Happy Tuesday A reminder of my Inquiry Focus for 2018: Lift Achievement in Maths for all students year 1- 13. Our overarching  school focus is: Acquisition of Language. I will be inquiring into: Would integrating the teaching of strand maths with number, help kids to better acquire key mathematical language, raising their achievement? I had my first real go of a DMIC Maths session this week and it worked really well. I must say I was apprehensive at first and a little scared to give it a go, however, I guess this is normal when starting something new that you haven't done before! I was doing some research online, and came across this article on 'Education Aotearoa' by Jannie Van Hees, who ran our first CoL PD arund language acquisition in children. I found it really interesting and I wanted to share what I took from it. Below I have copied and pasted some highlights from the article. Please note this is taken from http://ea.org.nz/con...