Maths Vlog

In another attempt to encourage learners into speaking about maths and develop their understanding of maths, I am trialling a task I'm calling Maths Vlog...again until I can think of a better name. This task involves learners creating a stack of objects in front of them and talking about the objects in relation to the concept being learned. This monologue is recorded then embedded into a Google Slide as if creating a vlog.

As can be seen in the example, the task is reusable (unlike worksheets), realia based (unlike many apps), and has some basic scaffolding to aid in learning.

The idea of Maths Vlog came from the success of SSR Selfie for promoting reading and FlipGrid for talking about maths. Hopefully this will be as successful as SSR Selfie in engaging learners with their basic maths concepts and provided the much needed mileage in using maths verbally.

Less than? Before? Minus one? What does that mean?

Observation of learners over the past years have shown that children in the tail end often have severe limitations in their vocabulary and understanding of basic concepts in size, order, and direction among others. Concepts need to be taught and repeated before internalisation occurs and application to problems can happen. How can I do this while meeting the demands of a full schedule? I know about apps, but frankly many are naff or incomplete for my needs. The many resources available from teachers around the world are often too babyish for my year 4/5/6 learners because these concepts should be developed in kindergarten or the first couple of years at primary school.

My solution is a series of semi open-ended tasks dubbed "Knowledge Cards"...until I can think of a cooler name. These are used with maths materials or other realia around the classroom to reinforce concepts in the learner's mind. Learners are also supposed to describe what they have done aloud in a Maths Vlog to aid in both reinforcing concepts and learning how to use the vocabulary verbally.

So far there has been a positive response to the cards I have developed. There are still some cards that I would like to make for both simple and more advanced maths concepts such as dividing/sharing items and part-whole number relationships.

Talking about capacity using Flipgrid

Capacity. What is it? How can it be measured? How is it usually measured? These are some questions for a maths concept that can develop some much needed language skills. But this is maths, how does one get children talking about maths? FlipGrid to the rescue.

In these lessons about capacity, children learned about containers and different ways of filling them up to find out how much they held. Children then learned how to talk about the comparative sizes of containers and how to measure exact capacities using a measuring cylinder and millilitres.

The capacity and verbal components to this lesson were very successful. The learners enjoyed using water and scientific instruments to find out about capacity. They also enjoyed sharing their learning by talking about it and using a simple video response recording system.

Problems arose with the word problems I had developed for them based on the learning done in the lesson. There were two main problems, both of which could be foreseen with knowledge of my learners. These problems were the inability to comprehend the problem despite being written in a simple and consistent format, and a lack of basic facts knowledge.

In subsequent lessons I structured and walked through how to understand, respond, and answer these problems with some success. I will need to continue scaffolding responses till learners become reasonably proficient before dropping the scaffold.