MPI Day 7 - Geometric Thinking

 It was great today to be reminded of the Class on Air resource, and see the search and filter functions this morning. I feel this is a resource I often forget to utalise in my planning. 

Subitising is a new concept name for me as I had not heard it before. I found the linked resource amazing and have already linked an activity to my class programming with the intent on doing many more with my students.

The site of Math Playground is new for me and has so many great activities and progressions. I have added thr symmetry painter activity to my planning as a warm up to help refresh some of our previous learning from earlier this year.

Mathigon is yet another new site for me this session. The courses especially seem to be quite extensive, and I think this will be a fantastic tool for my classroom, especially for my higher learners whom I can at times find extending appropriatly difficult.

It was great to spend time today going through concepts that I have already taught this year, and to see some different ways of approaching these, and also how they translate in our new draft curriculum document. It is always helpful when my own professional learning can be tailored to what is current in the profession, and MPI is most definitly adjusting each session to the new information, while not getting rid of the good practice and content. I am feeling confident that the learning I am doing will still be relevent in years to come for myself and my students.

Coming out of today, I am excited to have a list of strategies, resources and misconceptions that I will be taking with me into my classroom planning and daily practice. It has been good to have models and tasks revisited briefly from previous days (frayer model/figure it out online resources/Jo Boalar/tip charts/talk moves/rich tasks etc). Polypad was heaps of fun to explore and I can see fantastic potential for this tool too.

MPI Day 5 - Algebraic Thinking

Todays content of MPI was around algebra. We covered a lot on a wide variety of elements of this, and it was really good to be able to explore all levels of the curriculum in this area. It was good seeing how it looked at all these levels, and helpful to understand where students should be coming from and going to next.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion around mathematical discourse and the vocabulary required of students when building and consolidating these concepts.

Exploring the equals sign and other symbols and expressions was affirming for me and the way I currently teach mathematics in ym classroom. I often talk with my students around the 'language of maths' and how it is like learning another language. This works well for many of my students who are exposed to and often speak multiple lanuguages in their daily lives. Understanding there is deeper and often multiple meanings and therefore uses for a range of symbols helps students grasp the complexity and depth of what they are doing with more ease.

It was fantastic discovering more resources again today, specifically the following two of the online abacus and solvemoji.com/. I am also really looking forward to using 99math.com.

MPI Day 4 - Number whole and rational

Today we looked at a range of strategies for planning and implementing effective practice around teaching the number strand of the NZ Curriculum. I found the specific examples really inspiring and helpful to be able to take away with me. I am looking forward to introducing my students to choral counting and getting them to find patterns in the number sequences in class. I think this one activity has a huge range of scope to be bought into my classroom and can see myself using this to introduce and reinforce many different concepts within the maths and number curriculum.

It was great to dive deeper into tried and true strategies to teach specific concepts, and have time to look at resources and ways to use manipulatives, and then plan and program using these. Especially those of place value, fractions and integers.

It is great to have so many functioning examples of task boards to draw from. I definitely feel like I am not trying to start from scratch, but rather that I can manipulate existing provided systems to work well for me within my context, and therefore spend more of my time and energy focusing on implimentation rather than paperwork.

I am going to impliment specific ideas and concepts from today such as having 3 types of fractions written on a single number line, a classroom maths dictionary (to help us learn the language of math) percentage strips, and tip charts. I am adding these concepts to my current planning. I also found the slide of online manipulatives absolutly game changing for me. Having all these resources in a single space will make teaching older students so much easier. It can often be hard to store large quantities of manipulatives in a senior classroom, so having a digital alternative available to be able to give students unlimited access both in the classroom and outside of school is fantastic.

Ngati Kahu Histories 2024

Earlier this year I completed the Ngati Kahu Histories post graduate course with Professor Margaret Mutu. This course enables me to effectivly teach content around and from the 'Ngati Kahu: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation' text. 

I found this course incredibly valuable and have found it is already significantly impacting my teaching of the histories curriculum and specifically our local history. I am now feeling much more confident with this content and the way I approach it within my own classroom.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn more about such significant and pertinent topics of our history here in New Zealand.

MPI - Day 3

Today we looked at planning our program. We looked into grouping students different ways and timetabling each week. We were given a huge quantitry of tools, resources and sites today, and whilst a little overwhelming, I found this incredibly helpful. Moving forward from here I plan to simplify the taskboard I made previously so that it works better for me, and extending the use of my board to a fortnightly cycle rather than weekly.

It was good to see a number of examples around yearly curriculum overviews and breakdowns. This is something I feel we do individually at our kura but could benefit from doing a school overview.

I enjoyed looking deeper into rich tasks at a whole class level, breaking into small groups/pairs, and then coming back to share and extend with the whole class in a number of ways. I like my own strategy of giving students the answer at the very beginning, and getting students to focus on and share strategies rather than being answer driven. I find this works very well for students at all levels. I plan on increasing and structuring this more so it happens every Friday in my classroom next term.

Moving forward, I plan on explicitly exploring Mathigon, nrich, youcubed and eAko along with math fact lab in my programming for next term.

Nurturing Healthy Minds - Neurodiversity

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the Life Education PD around neurodiversity and creating positive environments for neurodiverse students within our classrooms. The PD was hosted by Cat Levine, and came with sound science backed research, some great discussion around these learners and what the world looks and feels like for them, and some practical strategies to help make my classroom a space where all students are able to feel comfortable, confident and supported.

MPI - Day 2

Today we focused primarily on knowing our learners as mathematicians. I am really looking forward to exploring some helpful websites that were shared throughout the day such as Banqer, MathVentures and SSDD. 

Our workbooks were shared to us today and it was good to have the time to start filling my data into this and get to play with that. I am looking forward to further exploring the use of the learning intentions and the matching relevent success criteria. It was good for me to look at the idea of success criteria not always being explicit before a lesson begins, but rather that it can be co-constructed or revealed throughout.

I really like the task boards that were presented to us this session. It was fun to explore these deeper and I would like to challenge myself to create a taskboard that works well for me and use it in my class. It is something I have not yet done as it has felt like a lot of initial work to set up, but I can see that it is really not much more work than the current timetable rotations I already use. 

I found the reflection slides for each student really good at the end of some of these activities, and think this will be a fantastic way to get constructive feedback from my setudents, while also promoting their self reflection, in a reasonably low stress way. 

Another full on, useful and information packed MPI day!