One of the factors of #whyiteach

The other day I taught a lesson about simple division and factors to a class of year 5/6s. It wasn't particularly noteworthy, no fireworks or fancy parades.  Most of the students made solid progress toward a deeper understanding though and ultimately that's the goal right?

I noticed a couple of girls who looked puzzled and offered them some extra time, a little later in the day, to work with me further.  You would have been forgiven for thinking I'd offered chocolate: they jumped on the opportunity. This is #whyiteach

While the rest of the class were working on the ten tweets they would send if they were constructing an online image of themselves (more about this another time), the girls and I pulled out counters, paper and a whiteboard marker. Yep, we drew on the desk with the whiteboard marker. (They seemed a bit shocked by this seeming bit of civil disobedience until I showed them how easily it cleaned off and then they loved the idea.)

We started with ten counters and physically manipulated them to see how many even groups we could create.  We worked through a couple of other numbers in this way with me continually asking:

"How do you know that's all?"

By the third number the girls could explain their thinking and demonstrate how they knew "that was all".

At this point I introduced the idea of working strategically to find pairs and recording our thinking in a way that would help us. We kept working with the counters to check our thinking.  (Have I ever mentioned how much I love having manipulative materials to use in maths lessons?)

Eventually one of the students explained to me that "if you start on the outside of the rainbow and work your way in, then you know when you've got them all because you can use your times tables to see that the middle ones just won't work".  Yes! Indeed you can. Again: #whyiteach

During this time I discovered that one of the students was struggling with odd/even so we used the counters to review that. English is not this young lady's first language and whilst her grasp of the language is brilliant I think this is one of the finer nuances that she hadn't learnt yet. It was fantastic to see the lightbulb moment when she made the link between the words odd and even and the concept she had already.   And another instance of #whyiteach.

Early in the session I reminded the girls about prime and composite numbers (I had reviewed these with the whole class earlier) so when they worked with 17 they were able to identify this. I love hearing kiddos use mathematical language to describe their thinking.

We also paid a super quick visit to rules of divisibility land. It was a flying visit, but you may be able to see the proof for the rule of divisibility for 5 on one of the sticky notes on the last photo.

This whole session took no more than 25 minutes but it stood out as one of the bright spots in my day. It's a prime example of #whyiteach

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...

Standard 1 Know students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it

Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

Are you a Weetbix kid?

For many months there has been an ongoing conversation in our classroom about the fact that despite what Sanitarium wants us to believe, not all Aussie kids are Weetbix kids. One kiddo in particular finds this idea (like Weetbix) hard to swallow. He regularly tells us that this is wrong, just plain wrong.

Can you see where this was going?

Well, I'll get there in a minute because the learning that lead to that was pretty exciting too.  Many of the kiddos and I have been avid watchers of Masterchef this season. It's coming to a close and, naturally, we've all got our favourites.  I talked this up a little and in Masterchef style I gave each person a token to vote for their one of two likely candidates for the finalists. Somehow we ended up with 28 votes, from 24 people. I couldn't have asked for a better way to raise the issue of tainted data!

Our next foray into data collection was a Google form.  (You can check out the form I used here.) As I mentioned last time, we've recently started learning about Asia. The Google form asked a couple of questions with different types of answers. We looked at how easy it would be to analyse the data from each question. (As a side note,  it acted as a quick and dirty form of formative assessment about Asia and the data analysis was pretty simple: we've got a long way to go!) Again we had more answers than people. This was mostly because I set up the form that way.  Once the kiddos realised that was my design choice"e they flew quickly into questioning data collection methods across the board.

"Is that how advertising companies come up with their funny statistics?"

"You could come up with any statistics you want to come up with this way. How is that ethical?"

"What other ways can you arrange the data to say what you want?"

"How did the Weetbix people get their data?"

Bam! There was the link.  Everyone fell silent and turned to me. I shrugged... To be honest I don't know so I turned it back on them. "How do you think they get it?"  No one was sure so we tabled the question for a moment while I got everyone up on their feet in groups of ten.  The makers of Weetbix claim that 9 out of 10 Aussie kids are raised on Weetbix so I figured that we'd work with two sample groups of ten to make comparisons.  I posed a couple of questions asking kiddos to move to different sides of the room:

1. Who eats Weetbix regularly? In both groups only 3 out of 10 kiddos eat it regularly. Hardly the 9 out 10 kids Sanitarium claims.
2. Who has ever eaten Weetbix? 10 out of 10 kiddos in one group and 8 out of 10 in the other to make an average of 9/10. Much more like Sanitarium's claim.

Or are they?

And the conversation was off. The realisation that data only answers the specific question asked was a very powerful one. The link to advertising and politics was instant, while the links to science were a little slower.   We never really found a definitive answer to the question of how Sanitarium got their data but we made a few hypotheses. 

We spent the rest of our lesson building data displays of the data I'd sneakily collected earlier that day.  For home learning the previous evening they had been asked to spend 20 minutes practising mindfulness, and on arriving at school they had to share what they had done (on a sticky note). We discussed this a a form of data collection and the challenged associated with collecting and analysing qualitative data. The challenge of grouping responses was evident as we created a tally and frequency chart. I had sneakily turned the responses into a word cloud while the kiddos were at PE earlier in the day so I presented this as one form of data display and asked if it was effective or easy to read. 

Resoundingly no!  So I challenged them to do better.  

We've posted them on one of our internal windows and asked the other students in our building which  data display is the most effective.  Which one do you think works best?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

I say data, you say dAta...

We're working on statistics and data at the moment.  I threw the kiddos in the deep end by providing a  pile of data displays and letting them investigate.  Here's what we discovered:

Our next step was a snap shot of our current thinking about the definition of data, which we did on answergarden.ch:

Some interesting ideas here that we delved into:

• History you can check - this raised the notion of qualitative versus quantitative data
• Sorted information - this raised some question about the difference between data and information. I didn't give the the answer to this quandary yet, I'm still hopeful that they'll come to it themselves.
• Collection of information - not yet having distinguished between data and information this was the most exciting point for me because it came up time and again which told me that there was a basic understanding.

We ran through a whole gamut of possibilities of what constitutes data to try to whittle down our understanding even further; and then compared which type of data might be easier to represent or analyse.

After much to-ing and fro-ing we took another snapshot of our understanding.

Information still features highly (as does funky?!?!) but there's a broader range of ideas now.

At this point, once again I've thrown them in the deep end. I directed them to the CIA World Factbook to collect data to build a data display comparing Australia with 9 other countries in Asia.  That was my whole instruction. A couple of looks of disbelief later (not sure if that was from the ridiculously ambiguous task instruction or mention of using CIA data) they all scurried away to get into it.

Asia, and Australia's place in it, is a topic we've just started this week. It's tied loosely to a big unit on Ancient India we'll be doing with our whole team later in the term but we're starting more contemporarily and broadly.  

General knowledge of which countries are actually in Asia was pretty scant. I will admit to being surprised, but gave everyone the benefit of the doubt because we've only just started learning about it.  Call me mean, but I let them all struggle with finding the relevant countries. A few had a look at the map on the wall, some others pulled out old-school atlases, a couple searched for 'lists of Asian countries' on Google. The rest turned to me. And I smiled and asked them to have another think.  Ha!

As a group they were pretty tech savvy so the act of making a data display wasn't a particularly big challenge. Choosing the right data display for the data they'd collected is a slightly different matter, and prompted some rich discussions.

How do you teach data and statistics?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

A Prime Assumption

Mini confession... This time last year I thought one was a prime number. Honestly. I had never really considered any other option so it was a bit of a rude shock when I realised that I was wrong. I was intrigued at the time but I put my curiosity to one side because I was juggling a new class, new year levels and new school. (And by juggling what I mean is trying to not drown.)

This year I'm teaching the same year levels in the same classroom with some of the same kids (can't begin to explain the joy I feel in this - that's a whole different post I think). I have the mental space to investigate why my original assumption was wrong.  So today, in a short break in a meeting, I did. It took no more than a minute.

Probably less than a minute.

And you know what?  I found the answer, I shelved my old assumption as misguided and I moved on. Simple as that.

So why didn't I do it last year?

I can't answer that easily. It probably has to do with some other assumptions I held - about myself. Like many new teachers I assumed that unless I was overwhelmed I wasn't 'doing' early career teaching properly - whatever that means. I assumed that always being on the run meant I'd get 'there' - wherever 'there' is. I assumed that admitting I needed help was a sign of weakness - however that works.

Yep. I held a whole bunch of pretty unhelpful assumptions. And it has taken me me somewhat longer than a minute to find the answers to help me shelve them.  I have though, and I think that's probably why, today, I admitted to my school's Maths Coach that I'd been wrong about a pretty basic fact, asked him for help and then took a moment to look it up.

Many of my assumptions have been challenged in the past year; the prime one being that I need to be anything other than what I already am.


(It turns out that there are several answers to my original question,  all increasingly mathematical, that are succinctly explained here.)

I'd like the menu please...

Some lessons just work well don't they?  A few weeks back I had one such lesson that I came home and raved about to my husband.  His response? "Don't tell me! Blog about it." Yes well, I didn't do it that night and I really wish I had.

Since then there've been a mountain of other great lessons but that particular one still stands strong in my memory because I truly felt like I was meeting the individual needs of every student in the room. Actually, I wasn't. They were all meeting their own needs.

At that point we had been working on our topic for a couple of weeks, and the usual broad range of abilities had emerged.  That's no end of fun  when you have a couple of students for whom the very concept of a fraction eludes them and others who can manipulate fractions inside out and upside down. So what's a girl to do?  I set up a learning menu of eight different learning activities that required no or very little teacher lead instruction - either because I'd already introduced it or the instructions were provided. [Side note: Until recently I'd never known that this particular method of teaching had a specific name…I thought it was just something that teachers 'did', you know?]

I started our lesson by referring back to the capacity matrix (if you're new to Langford'a capacity matrices, here's a quick explanation with examples) that we had developed against the ACARA Achievement Standards earlier in the unit. I outlined the available learning activities and matched them to the various capacities and capacity breakdowns and then handed it over to them. They each had a copy of the capacity matrix and hurried off to work on the areas they individually needed to work on.

No surface is off limits in our room!

As I moved around the room it was such a kick to hear students discussing and struggling with fractions. Yes, struggling! We celebrate the struggle: it means taking a risk and really learning something. We encourage each other to get uncomfortable and even have our own name for the feeling (the itchy tag feeling). The other exciting part for me was that the discussion was all about concepts rather than process. I'm a big believer that there's no point in teaching math processes if the conceptual understanding is missing. With fractions the processes are actually fairly mundane once the concept is grasped.

The lesson sped by so quickly that by unanimous vote we extended our time. I was able to spend time with each of the student either individually or in small groups: observing, prompting and coaching. What I noticed was that every single student was learning something different. They had each picked the area they needed to develop and that's where they were putting their efforts.  Even those working together had slightly different learning goals. LOVE IT!

Our end of lesson reflection was another learning opportunity. Different students had discovered different things whilst doing the same thing but upon reflection learnt from each other. How powerful is that?

This was designed by Krissy Venosdale.
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
You can cheek out her other posters on flicker
Or buy it (like I have) here.

Of course, if you'd walked into our room during this time it would have looked like absolute bedlam! But you know what? I don't care… Everyone was learning and at the end of the day that's what is MEANT to happen in classrooms right?

I have so much more to say about fractions but won't overload this post with it all. In the meantime: I hope everyone's enjoying the change in season!

Oh, and if you'd like a copy of my capacity matrix drop me a line. We think it's pretty impressive.











This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

What's the time Mr. Wolf?

Our current unit of learning in maths requires my young people to work with time. Our pre-assessment showed that many of them have somehow missed a lot of the skills involved in reading analogue clocks so I've paused our official unit to redress this. 

I started with a review of my understanding of the sequential development of reading time. Recognising that the reading of digital time is significantly easier, I started with a recap on the parts of an analogue clock face and their roles. I went right back to basics and we made interactive clock faces inspired by this pin. 

My research highlighted that at this age confusion about the hour and minute hands is often still prevalent, and this has been the case for many of my young people. Another point of confusion in our class is about hand movement.  We've worked hard to remove this confusion and today we had quite a few a-ha moments. You know the ones:

"So it takes an hour for the big hand to go all the way around, but the little hand only moves  between two numbers in one hour?"

Tic Tocs! 

"There are five minutes between two numbers but also an hour!"

Yes indeed!

Next I pulled out the big guns: a packet of Tic Tocs!  (For readers outside of Australia: Tic Tocs are a round iced vanilla biscuit (cookie), with clock faces embossed on the underside, made by Arnotts.)

Our white boards.

I pulled out the first couple and read the time. Using the clocks that we made the other day the class had to show me the time on their clocks. Moving on pretty quickly I started drawing the time (on an analogue clock) on my white board and asking the class to write the digital time on their show-me boards. Still moving pretty quickly I started giving a ranged of elapsed times - forward and back. Is back also called elapsed? Prolapsed? Hmmm.
The clocks were essentially cast aside by some children as understanding developed. Other children continued to use their clocks to self-check.   The high flyers worked in 24hour time, challenging themselves to make word problems to match my elapsed times.  (Yes, I did scribble them down for future use!)

You may be able to see here that each number on the clock
has a flap. Underneath has :05 or :35 etc.

Our very last step in today's lesson was by far the best hardest ... Eating the Tic Tocs! Tomorrow we'll use this new understanding with our 'official' unit on timetables.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

Girls? Boys? Mixed? All of the above!

I teach one of four year 6/7 classes at Hackham East Primary School. It's a pretty awesome gig: amazing kids; part of a great team; small class; staff focus on student support; good ICT set up; and strong focus on professional development. Yep, I love my job.

Anyway, I digress. I teach one of four 6/7 classes. None of the classes has more than 24 students, in fact I have only 20. Why so many classes with so few students? Aha! Here's the particularly interesting thing about HEPS: we run a parallel (and opt-in) single gender program. In our unit of four classes there are two mixed, one boys and one girls class. (I have one of the mixed classes.) The year 4/5 unit is run on similar lines also. In the past the junior years also had single gender classes but there wasn't a huge demand for it this year. (Hopefully next year!)

Based on the work of Michael Gurian, a gender based education expert from the USA,  and Ian Lillico, a boys' education expert from Western Australia, HEPS developed a boys programme back in 2008 and it has grown from there. (To get a bigger picture of how it all started and developed, check out the blog of Jarrod Lamshed. He's the single gender legend of HEPS. He's sadly missed though: this year he moved to another school.) The whole school operates on the understanding that the philosophies around single gender education can, and should, be implemented in both single and mixed gender classrooms to better meet the needs of everyone. And it's not just lip service: our unit splits into gender (and year level) groups for maths lessons; all planning actively considers gender learning differences; at each staff meeting we discuss how to better implement one or another of Lillico's 52 Recommendations (for school reform) etc. (We're all constantly working toward AITSL standards 1, 4 and 6!)

Mohammed Al-Khwarizmi
The 'father of algebra'

I'm currently learning with the year 7 girls. The year 7 boys are right next door, and we usually have the dividing wall open so that we're effectively occupying opposite ends of the same space. We're all aware that we're learning the same topic but we're not doing it the same way. The boys jumped in and got into 'doing' immediately. At the other end of the space we started by talking about what we already knew. From then on the boys had short snippets of instruction followed often by concrete materials and big picture problems. We looked at a short video about the history of algebra which gave the topic a personal hook for most of the girls. (It's a great little video: check it out here.) Since then we've broken it down into discrete building blocks that we're in the process of putting together. Some girls have raced ahead and are blowing me away with the way they're putting it all together, while others are still building their basic understandings. That happens in all classes though right? What's different about this is that the girls who can race ahead are racing ahead and doing so loudly and proudly while the girls who need more time are equally loud in their requests. They are taking risks and making mistakes. They're playing and having fun with maths ideas. I've never seen this sort of behaviour in girls before. Well, OK, that's not completely true: I have seen it but not to this extent. I also invite my year 7 girls and boys to share their learning as an added dimension to this process. The confidence my girls show in maths class spills into this interaction. My girls (and boys) are getting the best of both worlds. 

I'm still learning about single gender education; still working out how to implement the 52 recommendations in my own classroom. I doubt it's the kind of thing I'll ever stop learning.


This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn.
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments.
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning.

I'll just take a fraction more cake please...

In my year 3/4 class our last major push in maths for 2013 was FRACTIONS. Yep, we thought we'd go out on a high note. Actually, the kids all seemed to enjoy it as a topic and it was great to see their development. (As an aside, that's one of the advantages of composite classes - seeing such a broad range of development levels right in front of your eyes.)  

As I've probably mentioned about a dozen times, my co-teacher was our school's maths co-ordinator which was a double edged sword: she REALLY knows her stuff and is an amazing resource v's she REALLY knows her stuff and compared to her I feel rather inadequate. Of course each of those sides plays into the other and I learnt bucket loads from her. At the start of our fractions unit she told me that we needed to be careful to guide the kids to see fractions not just as 'part of shape' but as equal parts of a quantity. That really stuck with me (partly because I'd never thought about it that explicitly) and I focussed almost entirely on fractions of quantity rather than fractions of shape. (Notice I said almost because I did use shape when introducing equivalence.)

CC BY-SA 2.0 James Petts

My favourite fraction work came when I asked the class to help me with my Christmas catering. I presented a table with a long list of food items; the number of attendees I expected; and what fraction of the food unit I expected each person to consume (including different fractions for children and adults). Some were fractions of quantity (e.g. each child will eat 1/4 of a 12 pack of mince pies while each adult will eat 1/2) while others were more like fractions of shape (e.g. each child will eat 1/8 of a Christmas cake while each adult will eat 1/6). 

On first setting the task I felt like I'd let the team down - it seemed rather dry and uninteresting BUT the kids loved it. It had relevance to their daily lives at that point, and it was meaningful. I made sure the range of difficulty was quite broad and explicitly stated that I didn't want them to work from the top to the bottom but to choose their own items (and I set each child a minimum target number of food items to work on). The variety allowed the kids who need extension to find the challenges while the kids who needed support worked with me in a small group. 

The sharing and reflection session at the end was inspiring. My role was limited to very sporadic guiding through the social issues of turn-taking and airtime-hogging. So many different strategies and techniques that had not been formally introduced were shared.  So many 'a-ha' moments. So many organic 'what about if you do it like this' moments.  I always loved maths as a student but love it even more now as a teacher. The way we teach it is so very different... I wish all those people my age who hate maths because of the way they learnt it at school could sit in on some of our lessons and see how much fun it can really be.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.1 Physical, social & intellectual development and characteristics of students
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities
Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area 
Standard 2.2 Content selection and organisation
Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 3.1 Set explicit, challenging and achievable learning goals for all students 
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies  

Taking Shape

A few days ago I blogged about composite classes (here). I really enjoy the challenges associated with composite classes but I don't always get it right. *Sigh* My year 3/4 class has recently finished off a short unit of work on shape.   To be more accurate: we did a short unit of work about 3D shapes (including making 3D models) and composite shapes. To be even more accurate: we did a short unit on 3D shapes. What should it have been about? Well, if we're going by the ACARA maths document you'll need to go back a couple of sentences and then add in something about comparing the area of regular and irregular shapes by informal means. (To be completely honest though, I never had any plan to include area in this unit of work so it's not like I missed it out... I just didn't plan to teach it, when I really should have.)

Having said all of that, we had fun and nearly everyone met nearly all (if not all) of the intended learning outcomes. Phew!

I let them pull the shape
from the bag when they
were ready to draw it.

The feely bags were student
'run' after the initial modelling,
which allowed me to float
and observe everyone.

I introduced the unit with feely bags. I modelled reaching in, finding a solid polyhedron and then describing it using the mathematical language I  was  looking to see the children use by the end of the unit. I also asked the children to record their shape(s) in their maths workbooks using a drawing and labels. It was a great pre-assessment task as it gave me the chance to see (and hear), very quickly, where everyone sat on the learning spectrum.

We continued to explore the properties and features of 3D shape both as mathematical concepts but also as building blocks in our environment. It helped everyone to see that EVERYTHING is 'made up of shapes', both 2D and 3D. When we looked more carefully we were able to identify that 3D shapes can be described, in part, by the 2D shapes that make them. This lead to more conversation about composite shapes.

The activity you can see in this photo was offered with a range of entry points.  Ultimately, at every level, the students were asked to engage with the identification and nomenclature of 3D features and their possible nets. Solid polyhedron were available to help visualise how the nets might fold up to create the shapes. When I took this photo the student was manipulating the cube whilst talking about which part of the cube the net would next cover. The learning process was actually VISIBLE!

I never even knew about the Lego programme!
It's AWESOME

In the lead up to our assessment task I offered the students the opportunity to show me they could build/draw a 3D model on the computer. I left the task as open as that - they could use whatever programme, app or web2.0 tool they liked and create whatever model they wanted so long as they were able to explain their understanding to me either on the screen or verbally. (The Australian Curriculum for Maths is pretty specific about giving children the opportunity to learn and demonstrate their learning with and without technology, and as I've already shared with you here and here I am seeking to integrate technology into my maths programme more.)

I provided a puzzle page with 36 boxes; in each box was either a 3D shape, a net, or a number (most of which were the corresponding number of faces, edges or vertices with a few red herrings thrown in to sort the wheat from the chaff so to speak). The children needed to match the shape with its corresponding net and work out what the numbers represented and present this information visually. They found it a lot more challenging than I expected but then again, they also enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I asked early finishers to create a 'Who am I?' riddle for a 3D shape of their choice. Some of these were a hoot to read and showed great awareness of 3D shapes in the environment.

I love the creativity
in their presentations!

Some of the riddles.
Simple lift-the flap presentation.

The end assessment task was to use any material they could find in the classroom to create and label a model of an identifiable 3D shape. I'm not in love with this task, and there's plenty of room for improvement but it served its purpose this time. Here are a few of the results at various stages of completion.

Simple and to the point...

I love this!

This one is NEVER going to fall apart.

So,  you can see that the unit was pretty skewed towards 3D shapes and didn't really do composite shapes very well at all. I'm pretty disappointed that I didn't manage that too well, but know that I'll do better next time. More focus on composite shapes was required... I wonder whether this needed to be addressed in parallel?

Tell me about your well intentioned but not completely successful plans... (Please tell me I'm not alone!)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities
Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area 
Standard 2.2 Content selection and organisation
Standard 2.3 Curriculum, assessment and reporting
Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies
Standard 2.6 Information and communication technologies (ICT)
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programmes
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies  
Standard 3.6 Evaluate and improve teaching programmes
Standard 5.1 Assess student learning
(You'll note that I've said that this relates to these standards, which isn't to say that in this instance I was outstandingly successful in each of these standards... Clearly!)

Roll a number...

One of our numeracy areas of focus recently has been multiplicative thinking. It's fascinating to watch the range of abilities in the class: it's as natural as breathing for some and as foreign as Swedish for others.  To be honest most of the teaching and learning cycle for this area is lead by my co-teacher (I'm focusing on shape at the moment) but I'm reinforcing the fluency aspect with quick and dirty games whenever I have a free moment can make time. (And as we all know from this post and its comments, I'm a big fan of injecting fun into our day with the odd game or two.)

The favourite game at the moment is one I first played with little tackers and addition. We sit in a circle and two children each roll an oversized dice into the middle. The first child to call out the product remains standing. The other child sits down and the next child in the circle
takes their place in the next dice roll. Our class is pretty competitive so we keep a tally for each child's correct answers. Our champion so far sits (rather confidently) with 8 correct answers. (She's one of those students for whom this kind of thinking is as automatic as breathing.)

The small group who respond to this game in the same way they would if I said "vänligen äter din plockat sill" play a modified game, with one dice, practising doubling. They seem to enjoy the independence I've given them to do this, and I've certainly noticed an improvement in their fluency with their 2 times tables.

We've been working with 6 sided dice which limits the game somewhat however, today, I discovered (my co-teacher pointed them out to me) the ten sided dice in our classroom. Bring it on.

We had a small hiccup during the game a few days ago when the reigning champ made a mistake and the rest of the class celebrated her error.  I was very surprised to see this sort of behaviour from this class, so a little chat about valuing everyone as individuals and celebrating our differences ensued. *sigh* Competition is a great thing, until it's not.

What games do you play in your classroom to reinforce basic skills?


This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.1 Physical, social and intellectual development and characteristics of students

Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies

Standard 3.3  Literacy and numeracy strategies

Standard 3.4 Select and use resources

Standard 4.1 Support student participation

Standard 4.2 Manage classroom activities

Standard 4.3 Manage challenging behaviour

International Day of Chocolate Bite I

One of the first things my students ever learn about me  - because I tell them - is that I LOVE chocolate. All that other good stuff about classroom management and teaching philosophy can wait. So long as we're all clear on the importance of chocolate, reading, geocaching, laughing and quirky fonts then we're good to go.

So, it was in this context that last Thursday one of my students piped up with the magic words,

"It's International Day of Chocolate tomorrow!"

So. It. Is. And my mind  raced off trying to include chocolate in a meaningful way into my plan (because although, in my mind, any inclusion of chocolate is meaningful apparently the people who wrote our curriculum aren't on the same page as me on that front).

Here's how I turned an average Friday into an awesome day of chocolate-y goodness. (Well, that's a slight exaggeration but let's just run with it for now OK?

We started the day with a problematised situation (a la Ann Baker about whom I've written here and here)  about how we might share a certain number of boxes of chocolates. We talked through the problem as a class and then the students moved off to discuss their strategies in pairs before settling down to work on the problem individually. I was really pleased to see the variety of strategies the children used to approach the problem. The reflection session demonstrated some very creative mathematical thinking.

We spent some time in the library later in the morning and several of the students found books about chocolate. We're focussing on information texts during our literacy blocks at the moment so it was wonderful to see so many students spontaneously identifying features and comparing information text formats. (Yay for transferring knowledge across the curriculum!) I asked one group to choose a couple for me to borrow; they made good choices of books with a variety of information text formats.

Later in the day I used these books as the basis for a class discussion about the history of chocolate and the processes involved from cacao tree to shop shelf. My class knows that I have family in a cacao growing area so once they'd heard a little about the history and process they had a whole flurry of questions I had no idea how to answer to really think about. (To be completely honest, the extent of my personal experience with cacao fruit involves sucking the fruit clean from the beans before tossing them over the side of the ute tray I was riding on as we drove home from the farm.)  

Anyway, our conversation lead to the inevitable comparison of types of chocolate. We discussed the reason that the substance formerly known as white chocolate is not actually, nor ever was, chocolate. Love it though you may (for reasons I simply do NOT understand) it is not chocolate.  

And finally, of course, we had a taste test. Oh. My. Goodness.  I've never seen such eager anticipation for two tiny squares of chocolate. I handed each student  one square of both milk and 75% cocoa dark chocolate and guided them through a tasting process. We talked about the kinds of words that we were using to describe the taste and mouth feel after which some of the boys had  a rather heated competition to create the most interesting noun group about chocolate. 

I confess that during our reward time at the end of the day one small group of girls scoffed two entire family sized blocks of chocolate and went a little crazy. They weren't overly silly, rather more entertaining. I spoke with their parents and apologised profusely but nobody seemed too concerned and in most cases were really curious about what we'd learnt about chocolate. Phew! 

My husband claims that I was 'using' the concept of International Day of Chocolate to justify my obsession but even if that's true... We all had fun and I was able to link it to our current areas of learning so ha! Chocolate rocks! (Stay tuned for how I extended these links the following Monday.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...

Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities

Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies

Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies

Standard 3.4 Select and use resources 

Standard 4.1 Support student participation

Standard 4.2 Manage classroom activities

Standard 7.3 Engage with parents/carers

Chocolate must be good... Look at how many professional standards I can link to off the back of a rather spontaneously 'thrown together the night before' kind of day based on it!

It's War!

Early this week our class declared war. Well, not really but it was fun pretending.  As part of a whole school 'Maths Games Day' we ran an 'Addition War' stall and decorated it with genuine army gear (for which I must thank my dear friend +Adrienne Kajewski). Aside from our stall looking awesome...

Our class ROCKED the day with awesome attitudes, about the event and more importantly about maths!

My co-teacher is, amongst other things, the school's maths co-ordinator so this event was her baby. She did a great job. The school gym was split in half with dividers and each half was set up with tables around the perimeter (oooh look at the maths language). In the days/weeks preceding Maths Day each class chose a maths game to learn and then teach the rest of the school.  (Our class tossed up between three games but the competitive nature of most of our kids - and both teachers if I'm completely honest - meant that War was always going to win.) Over the course of the day each class was rostered to visit the gym and learn the games. Each class also rotated through student 'experts' to man their stalls.

The range of games the classes presented was great. The 'expert' helpers from each class really stepped up and were wonderful ambassadors for their class. Our kids went to town with our 'theme' and presented to the stall with war painted faces. (Between you and me, the war paint was my strategy for quickly determining who had already had their turn as an 'expert'... I painted them just before their alloted time.)

Have you ever played Addition War?   It's simple really: 

Our 'take home' instruction slip

• Remove jokers from a deck of cards and evenly distribute the remainder amongst players (the more players the more challenging the game). 
• All players place their top card on the table face up.
• All players compute the total of the cards' value (2-10 = face value, J-K = 10, A = 11) and call out the answer.
• The first player to call out the correct answer wins those cards and places them to once side.
• Play continues in this manner until player run out of cards.
• The player with the most cards is the winner. 

This game is pretty easy to differentiate in both directions. For students who are struggling: reduce the number of players; remove specific cards (I'd start with the aces); provide scaffolding support (posters with rainbow facts etc.) for starters. For high fliers: instead of addition try multiplication; have each player place down two cards and add the resultant double digit numbers; have each player place down two cards and subtract the lowest resultant double digit number from the other. 

Disclaimer: our student teacher introduced this game to our class and taught them how to play.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities;

Standard 2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Standard 2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies

Standard 3.5 Use effective classroom communication

Standard 4.1 Support student participation

What's for dinner? Hang around and my class will tell you.

The last couple of weeks have been an absolute roller coaster for me. I've started my new contract and LOVE my class. I think I've mentioned how excited I am to be working with my 'co-teacher', but I'm going to do it again: she's amazing! So much drive and energy! And just a never ending pit of knowledge. I'm like a pig at a trough sucking it all up. (Yep, there's an image you won't get rid of for a while. Sorry!)

We also have a pre-service teacher (student teacher) in the room for the first four weeks of term.  We're all comfortable in acknowledging that it hasn't all been smooth sailing so far but it has been a time of huge growth for us all and  we've definitely hit calmer waters now. It's been fascinating for me to reflect on how much my teaching practice has grown in the past year. 

One things I'm particularly enjoying is the fact that this classroom - in fact this whole school, - follows Ann Baker's maths pedagogy. (In fact today instead of a staff meeting we had a 90 minute professional development session linking her pedagogy to the new national curriculum. Gotta love a school that prioritises ongoing professional development!)

Our numeracy blocks typically follow her pattern of:

• a mental routine
• the main part of the lesson (such as strategy teaching or a problematised situation)
• reflection.

Possibly the most powerful part of this, for me, is tackling problematised situations. In a nutshell we offer problems that have their basis in real life, in ways that the students can relate to, and are engaged by.  The students then use their own (or shared) strategies to find possible solutions. It's a fascinating process that allows the students to apply their understandings and offer reasoned options. 

We're currently working on a rather large situation that involves my class  working toward making recommendations about what I should feed my (six) children. I presented the problem:

I just recently got married, and there are now six children in my family. Yep. Six. They all like different foods. Dinnertime is an absolute nightmare. I don't know how to manage this situation. I wonder if you could help me figure it out?

And  threw it open to them. We're working on data at the moment so they very quickly established that I needed to ask 'a bunch of questions'.  They then provided me with 176 questions to take home to ask the boys. (Oh yes, all six kids are boys.)  There were many repeats and so I ended up with ten questions and related answers.






On presenting this data to the class I commented:

That's lovely but it's not overly helpful. It's a whole bunch of words and numbers on a page. I still need your help.

So now they're all analysing the data to make recommendations.  Each at their own level of understanding.


I've seen tallies, tables, graphs and a few things I can't quite name.

Some students are using information from one question to help shape their recommendations based on other questions. It's AMAZING.

 Now my challenge will be to keep coming up with awesome problematised situations. I realise they don't all have to be this grand,  in fact I'd prefer they weren't, but the challenge is on.  I'd be happy to hear your suggestions.

If you haven't read about, or heard of Ann Baker head over to her website and check her out. I've bought a few of her books and am finding them to be a wonderful resource.


And here's the new bit to my blog. I'm going to try to link my posts to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Feel free to ignore this part if you wish.

Standard 3.1 Establish challenging learning goals; 
Standard 3.2 Plan, structure and sequence learning programs; 
Standard 3.3 Use teaching strategies; 
Standard 4.1 Support student participation; 
Standard 6.2 Engage in professional learning and improve practice; 
Standard 6.4 Apply professional learning and improve student learning.

Money Money Money

It seems fitting that in a class with a rabid avid ABBA fan that one of the two maths topics I had to cover was money. Even more fitting is that one of the concepts we needed to talk about was money around the world...

Money, money, money. Makes the world go 'round.

The concepts on the table were that money is a decimal system and that different countries use different currencies (but that they too are mostly decimal systems) and making purchases and change to the nearest 5 cents.

I discovered early in the process (within three minutes of opening the discussion) that most of my students (years 3 and 4) didn't understand the concept of money itself. Of course, they understood how to use it, but not that money is a medium of exchange with a representative value. It's actually a very abstract concept that takes a little mental gymnastics to grasp. Luckily for me YouTube abounds with funny, and quick, clips about the history of money that explain it visually.

The class comprises children from a wide range of countries and so our discussions moved fairly naturally into the currencies of their home countries.  Gotta love those moments of classroom serendipity!  Follow up learning involved handling foreign currencies, exploring their shared and different characteristics and searching a world map for their origins.

The currency we were using has been collected over a number of years from my, my family's and friends' adventures.  One of my favourite teaching moments so far has been the look on a student's face when she picked up a banknote and realised that, like her, it was Mongolian. To watch her move around the room showing  her classmates made me feel like I'd won the lottery because, ladies and gentlemen, that made all the abstract, conceptual, airy fairy talk about money MEAN something to every child in the room. Five minutes later we had a rerun with another student with Fijian money. Woot woot!

Here's a quick question for you... Which country has ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS printed on the rim of its coins (as being examined in the photo on right about)?








Being so close to Christmas opportunities to practise purchasing and making change were plentiful. My local department store generously provided me with a class set of catalogues from which each student wrote an unrestrained (and almost invariably obscenely huge) wishlist. For many of the children the challenge lay in tallying their items' costs because it was their first experience adding decimals. (Calculators were well used!) The funniest part (for me at least) came when I later gave them each a budget of roughly half their individual original price tally and they had to modify their wish list and tell me how much change they'd get from their budgeted amount. Ha! Yes, I am that mean!

Following this we planned a class market. As a class we designed a currency - recalling the shared characteristics of the foreign currencies and that it needed to be a decimal system - and formed sales units. Each sales unit designed and produced a small paper based Christmas product (i.e. cards, wrapping paper, note pads, gift tags, post cards) and set a price point. (Four of the five groups discovered the efficiencies of a production line which resulted in some pretty challenging conversations.)  Each child received a small payment and trade opened. Some stalls sold out while others struggled but... Everyone bought and sold something, several somethings actually! Our neighbour teacher came to do some Christmas shopping also which pleased the children immensely.

At the end of the day, the lessons learnt were many and varied. Perhaps the most interesting - particularly at this time of endless retail torture therapy - was that it's hard to work behind a sales desk making change and keeping up with customers' demands. I wonder if that experience will stay with them?