Monday 27 March 2017

Term 1 - Focusing Inquiry

Goal:
I will use IOL and TESSOL (Rub-off dictation - Verb Wall) scaffolding practices to identify students language needs and increase their ability to use verbs in their story.  

Indicators of progress:

- increase in student talk
- improve ability to write more than one word in a sentence
- increase confident to use variety of verbs in their story/talk
- increase students verbs knowledge 
- improve in student waiting for their turn

Checkpoint
- increase in the quality of student talk. 
Verb story helps students to identify more verbs o use in their talk or when expressing their feelings. 
- VERB WALL - students are able to identify and use words in their writing- 3 of my target students are able to write their story independently


Tuesday 21 March 2017

Imaging Numbers & Finger Pattern



Learning to image numbers in the head could be complicated for young learners. After considering and trying out many options, I believe that using fingers and ten frame are very efficient. 

Here is the finger pattern that my learners are learning and using to image numbers in their heads. Finger pattern and ten frame are very much connected and can be easily imaged by learners in their head once they recognised the relationships between the two.






Friday 17 March 2017

Intensive Oral Languge - increase student talk & vocabulary

We have IOL program every Monday morning and we are using the same topic for writing during the week. We are recycling the same topic-words for one week. This program gives more opportunities for students to talk and use new words being introduced.





 



 





Sentence Stems and Prompts - Increase Student Talk

Weeks 5-7

Goal:  Students are beginning to talk with confidence once they are gifted with correct Mathematical language to use. I will use TESSOL scaffolding practices (sentence frames and prompts) to support student to create and share in authentic contexts.

These are the sentence stems and prompts that I will be using in class during Maths lesson to encourage encourage student talk and increase their confidence in explaining their thinking.
 

 

Indicators of progress
(What I’m looking for that shows I’m making a difference to student progress)
  • Increase student engagement
  • Students using key vocabularies confidently
  • Lots of student talk
  • Increase confident to work independently whether with the ipad or any other types of activities
  • Students produce an art or movie on what they have learned.

Using sentence stems was successful for some students but not all. Sentence stems gave students starting point and an idea to focus on when thinking. At the end of the four weeks, I got to evlauate this and here are my findings.


Checkpoint
Weeks 5-8
  • Hands-on activities (as in our IOL program and using of real life problems LINK) lead on to increase student engagement.
  • Some students are able to use key vocabularies by repeating some rephrasing sentences from the teacher  
  • Increasing their confident to work leads to being able to participate in a role play and speak with confidence  
  • Some of the sentence stems are too hard for some students to use so I need to be selective of which one to use otherwise rephrase them.

Now that student talk has increased and students participated and contributed a lot -
waiting time is something to work on. Students to work on waiting their turn, and teacher on giving enough time for the child to respond.




Monday 13 March 2017

Everyone Can Learn Maths To The Highest Level.




This article have encouraged me to believe that every child in my class can learn Maths  to the highest level. It made me worked hard to see whether it is going to happen or not. The children are very young to understand the importance of Maths in their lives but it is my job to make them feel that they can be successful in Maths. I worked harder than ever, read lots of research looking for teaching approaches that may help students in my class. 

Thursday 9 March 2017

Problem Solving - Pair Share



After giving my learners time to think independently, they move on to share their ideas with a friend. This is how my learners are talking and sharing their ideas with each other. 

Athena and Faith are sharing their ideas. Faith shares her ideas and then Athena shares her's. At this stage, teacher is monitoring not teaching. It is ok to prompt for more information but this is not a teaching moment. 


Monday 6 March 2017

Teachers with high expectations in Maths

Through further Maths PLD I have realised that it is important to have high expectation for my students - children's performance in Maths can be influenced by teachers' expections. 




What do teachers with high expectations do?


Mixed ability groupings enable student talk. Students in my class were beginning to explain their thinking though I thought that they are too young. Students were learning from each other - they became friends with each other and so they were not shy to say however they solve a Maths problems. 

Well-defined learning goals is something that I do now. I used to do this before and I thought that children are too young to understand it. I have realised that children will understand if I made the goals specific and simple to be understood.

Responsibility for learning is something that I have started doing. It was ok at the beginning because it helped in managing some of the unexpected behaviours. But it did not last because consistency was not there. This is something that I will go back try doing it again. 





Step #1 for identifying inquiry focus for 2022

Unpacking and analysing last year's assessment data in week 5 of Term 1 2022 was essential when the school realised that we cannot colle...