Rotary dinner - Kiwi Can Waka Ama

 I was priviledged to be able to speak to the monthly Rotary club dinner reflecting on the experience of attending their Waka Ama Regatta with 12 senior students recently. I was able to talk about my experiences as a teacher and as a parent in this space, and also to coach two of my own children in speaking too. It was wonderful to make and build connections with another community group while extoling th virtues I have been fortunate enough to experience within a variety of roles.

On the road to Oruaiti

 Now that our school production is complete I have time to reflect upon the process, from writing the script through to performance night. It was a fantastic learning experience for me working with all 8 classes in the school, along with support staff and outside agencies to bring the vision to fruition. 

It helped me to have an overall plan in place, including a timeline, to ensure each class had what they needed in terms of support and structure so that both teachers and students felt prepared and comfortable getting to performance level.

I enjoyed being able to work with each class individually and teasing out the classes ideas in a way that brung it to life on stage in an achievable and meaningful way.

It was at times challenging to ensure different personalities and experiences were able to work well alongside each other, particularly when bringing past experiences to the table in preconcieved roles. It helped remembering the overall vision and intent when creating a student centered and focused experience for all.

I am pleased with the overall outcome, and whilst there are a number of things I would do differently if given the opportunity to do this again in the future, I believe the purakau focused learning experienced by students during this process was significant and positive. It has been lovely to recieve so much positive feedback from students, whanau and community, and I truly feel like I have managed to achieve something special.

Read/Write for Google Advanced Session

 I was able to attend and complete the read/write for google advanced session. I found many of these tools very logical and plan on implimenting them at a whole class level, before encouraging specific students to use them more exclusivly and frequently in class.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fCE4hfXFUwPUMbwKAH4qgo69f2jvSsoJ/view?usp=sharing

MPI Day 9 - Create and Share

Today we spent some time discussing and exploring the Create and Share aspects of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. It was great to hear other teachers ways of engaging whanau in this process, and I took away a number of strategies for my practice next year.

It was very positive recapping the vast quantity of learning we have gotten through during this course, and spending time reflecting on both the processes and the content. It is great realising how much more confident I am with the content to be covered in our new curriculum documents, and the range of strategies and resources I am now aware of to assist this too.

I am looking forward to sharing many of these resources, tools and strategies with my colleuge whom is teaching the same year level as me next year, and planning together to use many of them. I believe it will be very valuable for us to be able to compare accross the cohort, especially with the attitude pre and post surveys.

A sincere thank you to our facilitators for the time and effort they have put into this, and how they have gone above and beyond to support us all.

MPI Day 8 - Statistics and Data

Today we discussed the concept of data talk, aligned with math talks, specifically focusing on the reading of data. There are so many excellent examples and ready to use activities on YouCubed resources of data talks that I plan to insert into my planning in the future.

We spent a lot of time today deep diving into the PPDAC cycle, and a huge array of level open ended and level specific resources, relating directly to our currently draft curriculum.  It was great to find so many resources already translated into multiple languages ready to use, and the differences in the different phase expectations in statistics and probability. It was valuable to spend time exploring this as a cohort, and really clarify our collective understanding of how a students understanding is expected to progress over their years of schooling.

I found this Interactive graph activity on interrprating data a great warm up, or clarifying activity to check students understanding, with really clear pointers and clarifications for misunderstood questions and common misconceptions along the way.

Cencus at school is a fantastic NZ site providing vast quantities of statistical data collected from students accross NZ over many years. Not only does it seem to have a large quantity of support materials and detailed activity progressions at relevent levels from classroom teachers, it also has a new round each year which classrooms/schools can sign up to and then use their own relevent data in analysis activities and learning for students. I especially look forward to using the PPDAC fabulous feet resource from Cencus at School next year in my class.

I found the data cards a really neat way of displaying and manipulating larger quantities of data for students in a visual way. I would like to get my students to digitally create their own data cards with agreed on parameters to use in class, showing different types of graphs to display data and how this looks.

I have gathered a number of ideas and resources during todays MPI to further reflect upon and draw from with my classroom planning next year. It was good to gather tham into a single slide dek including todays planning task so as not to misplace them come next years planning and programming.

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.