Manaiakalani Film Festival Films

As previously mentioned, I enjoyed making films while I worked in the Manaiakalani cluster. In my time there I made and contributed to at least one film every year (except 2016). The record of them is below.

Contrasting my films to most of the other Manakalani films, you may notice that mine are more short film style rather than "learning videos", or what I call 'home video' style. In 2015, I had success in having students actually contribute to the development of the film, which was a learning experience for them. I thought this was a much more valuable experience for them compared to the teacher filming a PE session, or some other showcase of learning. You can see that style in my 2014 films, especially Along the Shore.

Later on, there was some feedback or a crackdown on certain types of film (films with violence?). Honestly, I can't remember what happened, but it made Ogilvie and me annoyed. That's when I started to put satire into my work.

Lastly, the 2021 book trailers were an idea from our principal. The idea was to have an easy idea that could be created anywhere in case of another lockdown. The LotR trailer was created by me alone due to the fact that we had run out of time and students due to Covid.

Film List

Tāmaki Primary School 

• 2014 
• Epic Rap Battle - Tagata o le Moana. Worked in tandem with Petra Lawrence.
• Along The Shore. Created this one in a very short time due to my work on the rap battle video not being recognised.

Panmure Bridge School

The playlist link for the PBS films is here.

• 2015
• Lost in Time
• 2016
• No movie. My fellow LS1 teacher Grant Ogilvie made the film this year. 
• 2017
• Bad Feeling
• 2018
• It's a Bit Dicey
• 2019
• How to Hold a Netbook
• How to Learn
• How to Cybersmart
• You're not you when you're hungry. Idea by Robyn Anderson. Filming, directing, and editing by me.
• 2020
• COVID
• 2021
• LotR Book trailer
• Fantastic Mr Fox Book trailer. The idea for this was a student's. I provided guidance and did the editing.
• 2022
• PokeBlade

While most of the movies were fun to make, I obviously have my favourites. My favourites are:

• PokeBlade. This wasn't submitted as the representative film for Panmure Bridge School at the Evening Showcase. However I had reports that during the day screenings, it was an audience (and adult supervisor) favourite.
• COVID. I really needed to satirise the situation.
• How to Hold a Netbook. Doing a "How to" series in the style of How to Dad was an inspiration by Ogilvie.
• It's a Bit Dicey. Can you tell that this is where my effort to satirise everything started? This movie combined kung fu movies integrated into our class's Inquiry topic and used blue screening and animation. This was all before I started using HitFilm as a film editor, so it was not easy.

Basic Facts Boxes v2

Basic Facts Boxes has been updated, four years after I first developed it. This version has several new features to improve the experience all coming under an altered basic facts focus and a different physical layout.

Basic Facts Boxes v2 focuses on the addition/subtraction facts to 20 and times tables, i.e. the first 100 multiplications. I work with students who have major gaps in knowledge and are often far behind expectations, so I need to figure out ways of helping them learn. The Numeracy Development Project takes children on a meandering path through number learning, which in my opinion makes children run sections of the path before they can walk. Focusing on the facts to 20 and times tables covers the main facts we English speaking people need as core maths skills.

To differentiate for those less skilled, there is now the option of choosing ordered or random. Ordered being the easier version... That's assumed, not tested. I would hope that students would be able to see a pattern forming so they can solve anything they don't know yet. Anyone who can't is likely to need a different level of education programme anyway.

The basic facts boxes that students fill in are now collated into two 10x10 grids (excluding frames). This change imparts several improvements:

• Increased practise frequency within a single "box".
• Smoother and faster number entry. Users now only need to use the tab and enter keys to move between cells.
• Improved screenshot captures.
• The ability to print to an A4 page.

Using a new format forced me to make improvements on the layout and programming. Everything except the title, grid, and buttons at the top are generated through the script. This brings everything one step closer to a "fool proof" spreadsheet where if anything (such as the grid) was deleted somehow, the whole grid would be reset/ regenerated by clicking a button.

Explanation Writer

The Explanation Writer is up! (See below)

It's a bit late for the Inquiry units we could have used it for, but at least it's ready for the next time students need to write an explanation.

Next will be the information report version which will need to be ready by next term in a couple of weeks.

Recount Writer - test results

Background

I created the Recount Writer in an attempt to further scaffold the writing of the recount text type. Initially the roll out went to my maths groups. Within this group of children, there is a wide range of writing ability. Subsequent roll outs were to my reading groups, most of whom find writing difficult, and the whole class in Inquiry.

In our school, we teach the structure of a recount as TREE; title, reveal, events, ending. The reveal is meant to introduce the overall activity done and who was involved. The events detail separate parts of the activity. We generally aim for three events for a standard recount or one event for a quick recount. The latter are primarily used in short blog posts. Personal reflections of the activity come in the ending section.

Test Results

Following are three results from different students showing a reasonable amount of success. An interesting point to note is that while all three of the events were set to compulsory in the Recount Writer scaffold, only the topic sentence for each paragraph was compulsory. The examples below show that students have attempted to add further detail, for the most part.

This recount is from a student in my maths groups. This student is both new to the class and has difficulty with sentence structure, particularly tense.

The sample shows that while the student still has issues with tense, they have been able to separate the learning task into three separate events. Separating events is often a big hurdle in writing recounts and learning how to use paragraphs.

Animal Rescue Centres is a text I taught for reading. The student who wrote this is new to the school, new to using netbooks on the scale we do, and comes from a Te Reo Māori immersion kura so less experienced with writing English than other students.

We can see that they have not only separated events, but also started to think about where sentences start and stop. This is part of the how the Recount Writer was designed. The easiest next step for this student would be to remind them to use full stops at the end of their answer to each prompted question.

The fact that this student has written about what they did over several lessons as opposed to the reading tasks is an indication of where many students are at in terms of their understanding of the content they need to be blogging about.

Party popper Prototype is written by a more experienced writer who has worked their way up from being an unproductive student. All of the aspects of recount writing are present. The next step for a student like this could be to use the Recount Writer to develop single events that are detailed over multiple paragraphs. Alternatively the next step would be to take them off the writer after a bit more practise and have them write blog posts of this detail.

Next Step

The premise of a writer has been shown to have promise. The next step is to adapt this to the Information Report and Explanation text types.

Reciprocal Maths UPDATE

 Follow this link for an update regarding the Reciprocal Maths idea. Spoiler alert, there's been an overhaul.

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.

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.

Addressing the basic facts gap

How have Grant and I begun to address the basic facts gap?

Basic Facts Boxes

Basic Facts... a gap in knowledge that I never had when I was growing up. A gap in knowledge that prevents or hinders improvement in most areas of mathematics. How can Basic Facts knowledge in children, who are in some cases quite far behind expected ability, be brought back to average and boosted further?

Here's something I developed to give it a go.


This Google Sheet populates boxes with random addition and subtraction problems to solve. On entering an answer, the sheet checks the answer and gives immediate feedback. Another sheet in this Spreadsheet does the same for times tables and the corresponding division facts.

I tested the first version of this on my own pupils to limited success. The positive is that many of the kids wanted to keep going until they got everything correct. The negative was that they didn't take screenshots of the boards that had errors, so there was no record of their improvement.

A colleague, Robyn Anderson tested version 2 (without the times tables) with her class. You can read about her success and outcomes I never expected from this tool on her blog post.

The inspiration for this tool came from two places. The first being a Japanese tool for memorising basic facts and the second being Monty Jones's (Tāmaki College) spreadsheets for practising maths problems at secondary school level.

Feel free to copy it, use it, attribute it, and tell me about the successes and challenges you have had.

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.

 

Concept Star - speak, please!

How do I promote speaking and sharing ideas to my maths learners? I had no idea. I have hunches that there are confidence issues as well as oral language issues as I have discussed before. The ideas mentioned revolved around ESOL and underdeveloped oral language skills, however I also noticed that my learners for reading and writing (whom shouldn't have many issues with communication) were willing to share ideas within small groups, but not as a class.

After trying a talking hands approach and gaining some traction, I decided to try using a Concept Star with my reading groups as a testing ground before using it with my maths learners. Concept Stars are used by learners to note down concepts the have learned before telling others. See how it was used with two of my reading groups here:

Here is a Google Drawing template of the Concept Star adapted from the TKI ESOL Online page about speaking strategies. If you use this template, please leave a comment about how your lesson went.

Maths Synonyms

Bolstered by my mild success from the basic vocabulary lesson, I decided to try connecting the language of mathematical operations to everyday vocabulary they may already know. The idea was to also expand their vocabulary with related words they may not have already encountered.

In the lesson, learners focused on the core mathematical operations add, subtract, multiply, and divide. In groups, they used beans to demonstrate and explain the actions made by the operations.

The follow up task required learners to make videos demonstrating the meanings of the following words: sum, take, split, count up, remove, withdraw, total, cut, reduce, group, trim, share, tally, decrease. The words and videos were to be organised under the headings of the main operations.

Find, Draw, Animate, Act - Maths version

After trying a lesson on the language of subtraction using word problems, I decided to get back to basics.

In this lesson I went back to understanding the vocabulary behind quantity, magnitude, position, and direction. In the lesson, learners looked at the difference between big and tall first, then after discussion, the difference between much and many. Listening to learner discussion, I confirmed that many holes in understanding some of the more basic concepts such as big/small, before/after, first/last.

The task to complete was a vocabulary tool I have used before in reading lessons called Find, Draw, Animate, Act. In this activity, learners complete different tasks to demonstrate the meaning of words they have just looked up. The task is normally an open task for learners to input any new words they have learned from a text, however in this case I deliberately input the maths vocabulary. Selecting the words and tasks the learners had to do for each word lowered the cognitive load, with the intention that learners focused on looking up the meanings of words.

Following are a copy of the learning slide and the list of vocabulary.

Subtraction language

The first thing I tried for increasing vocabulary was looking at word problems and decoding/ unpacking the language of subtraction problems.

In the lesson, I used two simple word problems to unpack the language with learners. We worked through understanding what a given problem might look like physically by trying to comprehend the sentences.

For the follow up task (click here to view), I used a basic worksheet style task with mixed addition and subtraction problems. Learners had to cut and paste word problems into either the Addition table, or the Subtraction table depending on what they thought the problem was. Learners were then encouraged to solve the problems, but this was not set as a compulsory task because I wanted them to focus on understanding the problem rather than rushing in to try and solve it.