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.

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.

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?

Back to phonics for me

Phonics, decoding, and spelling; a brief overview of our programme being instituted in the class.

Place Value rears its ugly head again.

See this blog post on me having to teach Place Value again, this time successfully.

A Gap in Knowledge

See the new post about a knowledge gap in my higher ability maths learners.

Place Value...a teaser

EDCURRIC 714 Exploring Mathematical Thinking taught by Gail Ledger at the University of Auckland is a great paper for learning about how humanity has thought about how number systems work and how the place value system came about. The practical values come in understanding where to start developing the concept of "one" or a single unit and building that into the concept of place value among other mathematical concepts.

Follow this link to the University of Auckland calendar website.

As it happens, the next weak spot in my groups' understanding to work on is place value. I used the idea of teaching the Ancient Egyptian numbers and numeral system last year to teach place value. The kids enjoyed it. Whether it helped them further develop an understanding of place value, I don't know. This coming term I'll be doing something similar, but a bit more 'hands on' and a bit more localised...

Ancient Egyptian numbers. Source: Grauberg, Eva (see below).

Now, time for the obligatory declaring of evidence that I have done some reading on the topic and not just pulled these ideas out of thin air. There are many texts on place value and ancient number systems, but here are a few (no, I'm not using any particular format e.g. APA).

Place Value:

• Elementary mathematics and language difficulties; a book for teachers, therapists and parents (1998). Grauberg, Eva.
• Children's Developing Understanding of Place Value: Semiotic Aspects. Maria Varelas and Joe Becker. Cognition and Instruction, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1997), pp. 265-286

Number history:

• Numbers through the ages (1989), Written Numbers pp. 76--130. Flegg, Graham.
• The Beginnings of Arithmetic, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 12, No. 177 (Jul., 1925), pp. 401-414. L. N. G. Filon

Ancient number systems:

• Ancient Egyptian - see above sources
• Chinese -
• Joseph, G. (2011). The crest of the peacock: non-European roots of mathematics (3rd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press
• Pellatt, V. (2007). Numbers and numeracy in Chinese culture, language, and education : the social substratum of the development of mathematical thinking.

Talking Hands, empowering learners to speak their minds.

Oral language is becoming an increasingly focused upon area of development where I teach in particular. Last week's PD was on a number of ways to promote speaking in the class. Several strategies were covered, most being reminders of strategies that I have been taught over my limited experience as a teacher or during teacher training.

One strategy which I had initially dismissed was talking hands. Showing learners hand signals they can use for common responses helps them develop the confidence to give their opinion without the pressure of having to say anything. Combining this with conversing with learners rather than questioning them helps teaching them how to have conversations, how to discuss differing opinions, and awareness of how their speech sounds to others.

Reflection on the needs of my target students, I decided to give both the conversation and talking hands strategies a try in class. I used both on my reading groups which yielded reasonable results for the most part, with one group developing the confidence to speak out to correct a peer's incorrect statement in a constructive manner. My maths learners were shown hand signals only, to which there was a good response. 

To develop the confidence to speak in my learners, I will need to continue with the talking hands and conversation style of teaching. Hopefully this will increase their speaking "mileage" and exposure to new vocabulary and ways of communicating my modelling.

Oral language activities

This resource for oral language was introduced to me to help with my inquiry into improving maths achievement through vocabulary and oral language development.

There are many strategies for developing confidence and ability in oral communication as well as developing listening comprehension. The strategies have their base in ESOL language support, making them relevant for the learners I will be teaching this year. Many of the learners I will teach maths this year have under developed oral language abilities or are ESOL due to their parents being immigrants to New Zealand themselves.

http://esolonline.tki.org.nz/ESOL-Online/Planning-for-my-students-needs/Resources-for-planning/ESOL-teaching-strategies/Oral-Language