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.

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.

SSR Selfie

About a month ago I heard something I'd never heard in a class before, "Yay, SSR!" This year (2018), I am teaching the learners in my class that generally enjoy reading and comprehend their reading better, however this child wasn't particularly into reading. I decided to investigate deeper and found that my learners from last year who weren't particularly into reading also enjoyed my SSR activity.

SSR Selfie is an independent reading activity that I tried to model on social media use without actually getting onto social media thus keeping a bit more control and safety for the learners. The activity involves learners reading a book, taking a selfie with their book, then retelling or explaining what they have read. For some learners this could be an entire book or text, for others it could be a few pages in a novel they're reading. The point is that they discuss what they have read during their SSR time. The activity doesn't stop there however. Because I have made it on a shared Google Slide, this gives other learners the opportunity to check out what their classmates or friends have been reading and leave a comment. The children enjoy being able to talk about what they have been reading and leaving comments on other children's posts.

What is the upshot? Integrating learner voice into a task can yield increased motivation and buy-in for a learning activity. I want to try something similar for writing and maths activities.

Below are some examples of how it worked out this term. Here is a link to the template. If you like it, please leave a comment.

Maths Synonyms - reflection

The synonyms task I tried earlier this week was not as successful as I'd hoped. I had not anticipated two things: the learners misunderstanding the task and the learners not looking up the meanings of words they were unfamiliar with.

I still feel the vocabulary task would have been a valuable task for the learners to engage. Learners would be exposed to both the connections between everyday and mathematical vocabulary, and the nuances between synonyms such as trim and cut.

Ultimately, a positive is that the learners gained a stronger understanding of the meaning of the words addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. However these synonyms will most likely need to be revisited someday.

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 - reflection

The subtraction language task was a almost a dismal failure. Many of  my learners were not able to unpack the language in the task. I will have to step back to more of the core concepts and build up language from there. I will also need to ensure tasks are explained and scaffolded better.