Equivalent Fractions

Auckland is still at Level 2.5, which means the desks in my classroom are very spaced out with students remaining in their seats during the lessons.  We are currently not teaching in small groups, which means that I am teaching my maths class using a whole class approach. Keeping this in mind, I decided to try a more investigative approach to discovering equivalent fractions and I recorded this lesson for Manaiakalani Class On Air.

I decided it was important to start the lesson with a low "on ramp" and then progress through the mathematical stages building upon the knowledge that we had just gained (or reviewed for some). To read more about this lesson, check out my page on the Class on Air website here.  

This lesson was a fun way to have the students conduct an investigation to discover a mathematical concept. I feel that my students were able to grab onto the lesson from the beginning no matter their maths learning level and by the end of the lesson, all students were able to understand how to multiply the numerator and denominator by the same number to get an equivalent fraction.  I also realised that since each student had their own piece of paper, they were responsible for figuring out the new fraction. Since I was able to see them trying to figure it out, I was able to provide the correct amount of wait time for all students to be on the same page before moving on.

PES Reading Inquiry

This term, the teacher's at Pt England are continuing to focus on collaborating to achieve a common language for teaching reading. We are primarily focusing on our students reading from Blue to Gold on the NZ Colour Wheel (students reading reading from 6-8 years). 

At this time, we are focusing on "fixing" words that the students read incorrectly. We were asked to read with a focus group of students one on one and see how we could apply the fixing prompts to our reading session. 

I choose to read a page out of the text the students were reading for their learning task about Te Horetā and Captain Cook's encounter.  I found it very interesting that I had multiple students replace the word "cloak" with "clock".  It was interesting when I used the "finding" prompt:

You said "They sat closely together on the deck, watching the men exchange flax CLOCKS for nails and other goods." Does that make sense to you? 

The students instantly knew that it didn't make sense so I moved on by saying, "Well, when you look at that word, you're right the beginning of clocks does have a "CL" blend just like the word on the page. If we take the CL off of the word in the text, do you know what it says?"

Both students were unable to read the word "OAK".  I then decided to move into other words that had the "OA" sound in it as it is used in cloaks. "Do you know any other words that have 'OA" in them=?"

The students were able to say "Boat"  

"Ok, if we take the sound that we hear in Boat and put that same sound in for oak
what do we have?"

We then went back and reread the sentence from the text and the students were able to properly read the word cloaks. They actually went back to their seats feeling very accomplished just from that small interaction.

Hapara Certificate

Today, my certificate arrived from Hapara and the Champion Educators course that I completed during our second lockdown. This was such a great learning opportunity and I had so much fun finding out all the things that are available on Dashboard since the many upgrades it has had over the years. To read more about the course, check out my blog post here.