Reciprocal Maths

 Read about the Reciprocal Maths idea Go for teaching and I developed here.

Recount writer - a digital scaffold

Background

Last year GO for teaching and I came up with an idea to increase writing mileage while freeing up time for more targeted teaching in writing. See our initial post and the follow-up post regarding the update. This idea was successful in having students practise writing different text structures (recount and information report mostly) semi-independently for their blog posts. Moving practise time to non-lesson time allowed us (the teachers) to focus on teaching more grammatical and stylistic points. The extra practise time was particularly needed during the various lockdowns throughout 2020, which made us lose a lot of lesson time.

Issue

This year, our class has not been completing the same volume of work despite being at school more because there are less lockdowns. There seem to be a multitude of possible reasons. One of those reasons is our class make up having expanded to include year 4's The year 4's are a small group of students who aren't used to the amount of production required for years 5 and 6. 

Fix

After throwing around a few ideas, Go for teaching and I decided on another scaffold to try speeding up the process of getting blog posts written while learning the different parts of various text structures, starting with recounts. The scaffold made (see below) is based on a survey mailing list that we came across. The Recount Writer uses prompts divided into the different sections of a recount to aid students in writing their recounts.

The Recount Writer then sends a copy of the student's responses written and formatted on a Google Doc to their inbox (see examples below). Students are then expected to copy and paste the text into Blogger to create a blog post.

The next step, aside from refining this prompt, will be to create scaffolds for the information report and explanation text types.

Create Staff Meeting Workshop

I ran a workshop at the August 2020 Create Staff Meeting Workshop on using Pencil Code for art and maths. The Create Workshop ran for Manaiakalani staff is a cluster wide staff meeting where teachers hold workshops to pass on skills for teaching children. The focus of the skills is on the 'create' part of Learn Create, Share, which involves children creating digital learning objects (DLOs) as learning tasks. 

My Pencil Code workshop took people through some challenges to learn the basics of coding. The first challenge for example, had people drawing a straight line, then expanding on that skill to create a house.

After creating the house, people could continue with the basic shapes challenge to create a smiling sun, or move on to the Coding Angles challenge.

The Coding Angles challenge tasks people with coding the turtle to travel between locations by measuring the angle and estimating distance between locations. This task involved the use of both digital and physical resources through using a protractor.

The afternoon was a good introduction for everyone into Pencil Code and how it can be used in the classroom for maths and art with these challenges. Pencil Code is more versatile and I would like to try coding simple quizzes or pick a path stories with children.

Reading PD with Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey

Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey held a PD session on balanced reading programmes. The balance being talked about was between modelled reading, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading. One of my key takeaways from this PD was to use template follow-up tasks rather than specifically created tasks. I tend towards the latter, which is in Sheena and Louise's words, unsustainable.

Lockdown teaching

Yes, that Covid Lockdown. What are the learnings I have taken from teaching through lockdown? Working in a digital learning environment, I was quite confident that most of the 'digital component' would be easy enough for students to pick up. Generally that was the case, however what did go awry  was the students not understanding the written instructions given. I tried a number of different things to allow students to understand their instructions.

The most wide ranging strategy was to create video tutorials showing how to do tasks (Light and Sound inquiry unit with video tutorials showing how to complete tasks). Another wide ranging strategy was to simplify the language used in written instructions. Finally small group or as close to one on one support as possible was provided through video meetings where I held tutorials.

Lockdown taught a lot about existing procedures, how much of instructions our students actually comprehend and retain, and helped establish better work flow procedures.

UPDATE Blog post structure

There has been success with students applying the text structures when writing their blog posts. Now it's time to teach and add the language features to this poster. 

Here's the post talking about teaching language feathers.

Blog post structure

TREE, TIIC, TIMES, the text type structure acronyms for recount, information report, and explanation respectively have been taught in my classroom for at least 3 years. So it was a bit of a shock to find that many students we have taught already (in some cases this is their third year with us) cannot remember them and how to apply them. See the blog post I have written about this here: https://ls1teaching.blogspot.com/2020/05/blog-post-structure-update.html.