Welcome to my Professional Learning Blog! This year, I am teaching in a 1:1 Chromebook classroom with Year 3/4 students at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand.
At this point in the year, I am so proud of the progress that my Teir 2 children are making. It is quite evident that the extra small group time they are receiving in their tier 2 group, as well as the work they are doing in class is making a massive difference in their reading fluency and word recognition. As I prepare for Running Record testing during the next few weeks, I am excited to see the progress of these children and to see what my next steps in teaching might be as we progress through the middle of the year.
Now that we have concluded our Running Record testing I am very proud of the progress these children have made. After consulting with their tier 2 teachers, I have decided to move them from reading BSLA books to the PM books to better equip them with the comprehension skills and ability to complete learning tasks for their level.
Moving forward, I would like to have my focus be the group reading at Turquoise/Purple to better equip them to complete work at this level across all subjects and to improve their comprehension strategies when reading more involved texts before the end of the year. I would really like to see these children move to silver by the end of the year so that they are no longer 2+ years behind but rather only one year behind moving up to year 5.
At the end of 2025, I began training as a year 4 teacher in BSLA. As my training comes to an end this term, I am looking at how I can better implement small group teaching using the BSLA readers and teaching processes with my Year 4 Tier 2 students.
During the first portion of the year, I am going to focus on working with these tier 2 groups through my modeling of target graphemes and how it directly translates into student accuracy during the word-blending phase of book introduction.
My overall Inquiry Question is:
How effectively am I using 'Vocabulary Elaboration' and 'Story Grammar' mapping to prepare students for the specific linguistic demands of the new text?
My hope is that through my whole class taumata I can introduce the strategies of vocabulary elaboration and story grammar mapping that will directly fall into completed and successful independent tasks with the children. I do recognise that those in my tier 2 groups will require a little extra assisstance as the year progesses, which is why I will be placing some focus on my small group interactions with them a well.
This year, I have been focusing on my maths teaching while implementing our new maths program Prime Maths. My students are doing very well and we worked hard to understand and implement this new focused way of teaching maths.
For my final Vosaic observation of the year, my question was: Has the teacher implemented a lesson that allows students to explore mathematical concepts, using manipulatives as tools for discovery, while also facilitating meaningful mathematical discussions and problem-solving?
The progam had this to say about my lesson:
Yes. The teacher implemented a lesson that uses manipulatives for student exploration and supports mathematical discussion and problem-solving.
Manipulatives used as tools for discovery: The teacher instructs pairs to each take 10 counters and to combine and split them to explore division. The class physically combines to make 20 counters and then splits into two groups, and later students are encouraged to use counters or draw on whiteboards/MacBooks for practice.
Exploration of mathematical concepts: The teacher models and elicits conceptual understanding of division as “splitting into groups,” connects division to multiplication as its inverse, and demonstrates multiple symbolic forms of division. Concrete examples are used (20 rings into 2 groups → 10 each ; 9 seahorses into 3 groups → 3 each ; 20 chicks into 4 nests → 5 each at.
Facilitation of mathematical discussion and problem-solving: The teacher prompts pair talk and checks students’ grouping, asks guiding questions, asks students to write number sentences and explains how to record division, and has students both draw representations and use facts to check answers .
Opportunities to justify/check answers: The teacher models checking division via multiplication and has students demonstrate by counting or using multiplication facts.
Evidence-based moments to highlight
Moment 1 (manipulative exploration): Students combine counters and split into two groups to discover 20 ÷ 2 = 10.
Moment 2 (conceptual discussion and representation): The teacher connects division to multiplication and shows multiple symbolic representations and a fraction connection.
Conclusion
Overall, the transcript shows a lesson structure that integrates manipulatives for hands-on discovery, prompts partner discussion, models representation and notation, and reinforces conceptual understanding and checking strategies—supporting meaningful mathematical exploration and problem-solving.
At the beginning of the year, I was most worried about how to best implement the use of manipulatives to springboard conceptual understanding and mathematical vocabulary development. Now, I fully believe that take the time to read the teacher notes and follow them as a guide for my maths lessons I can easily achieve this in my lessons on a daily basis.
The summary of my lesson provided me with more feedback that I will consider moving forward into next year, primarily providing more opportunites for students to talk during our math sessions especially during the we do/you do portions of our lessons.
After teaching from the Prime Maths program for a few months, I decided it was finally time to gather myself together and record a lesson to upload into Vosaic. Once I did, I was rather happy with the feedback that I received from the AI in the program.
The summary of my lesson was:
The teacher effectively uses hands-on learning by incorporating place value blocks for students to visualize subtraction with regrouping. This strategy helps students understand the concept of borrowing in subtraction. The teacher also encourages collaboration by having students work in pairs, which promotes peer learning and engagement. Additionally, the teacher checks for understanding by asking questions and prompting students to explain their thought processes, fostering a deeper comprehension of the material.
The teacher employs classroom management strategies such as setting clear expectations for noise levels, reminding students to work in a "whisper zone," and redirecting off-task behavior. The teacher also uses positive reinforcement by acknowledging students' efforts and correct answers, which helps maintain a positive classroom environment.
As far as next steps goes, I wasn’t all that surprised to find that the suggestions were right where I’ve been thinking about how to improve my maths teaching.
Suggestions for future lessons:
Incorporate more student-led discussions to increase engagement and allow students to express their understanding in their own words. Utilize formative assessments throughout the lesson to gauge student understanding and adjust instruction accordingly. Provide more opportunities for students to explain their reasoning and thought processes to deepen their comprehension of the material.
However, I think this comes along in this program more as the lesson moves into the “you do” portion of our problem solving and I didn’t record this portion of the lesson as it wasn’t what my focus was.
Once I put it my inquiry focus question as an AI prompt: Has the teacher implemented a lesson that allows students to explore mathematical concepts, using manipulatives as tools for discovery, while also facilitating meaningful mathematical discussions and problem-solving?
I was pleasantly surprised with the analysis of lesson implementation from the Vosaic AI.
Yes, the teacher has effectively implemented a lesson that allows students to explore mathematical concepts using manipulatives as tools for discovery. Throughout the transcript, several key strategies are evident:
Use of Manipulatives: The teacher encourages students to use place value blocks to visualize the subtraction process. For example, at timestamp 01:17, the teacher instructs students to "pull out our place value blocks" and work in pairs to build the numbers 252 and 136. This hands-on approach helps students understand the concept of regrouping in subtraction.
Guided Discovery: The teacher guides students through the process of borrowing in subtraction. At timestamp 03:31, the teacher asks, "What do you need to do?" prompting students to think critically about the need to borrow from the tens place. This encourages students to articulate their thought processes and engage in problem-solving.
Encouraging Collaboration: The teacher promotes collaboration by having students work in pairs to build numbers and solve problems together. For instance, at timestamp 01:28, the teacher assigns pairs to build the top and bottom numbers, fostering a collaborative learning environment.
Mathematical Discussions: The teacher facilitates discussions about the subtraction process, asking questions that require students to explain their reasoning. For example, at timestamp 06:13, the teacher asks, "Now what do we have left?" This encourages students to reflect on their calculations and engage in meaningful dialogue about their understanding of the concepts.
Checking Work: The teacher emphasizes the importance of checking answers by adding the result back to the smaller number, as seen at timestamp 08:16. This reinforces the concept of verification in mathematics and encourages students to think critically about their solutions.
Overall, the lesson is structured to promote exploration, collaboration, and discussion, which are essential components of effective mathematics instruction.
Interestingly enough, the final statement says that the lesson promoted discussion, but I loved that the summary suggestions provided key ways to promote more student-led rich discussion. Looking forward to focusing on this more as the year progresses.
We are moving along into our Prime Maths journey, and as we move along we have encountered many learning bumps along the way. However, as a class, I strongly feel like we have made the easy turn to understanding. The students now understand what is expected of them and they are working diligently to complete their learning in a timely manner. They had developed a deeper understanding for MathsPro (the online "assess" component) and now know that they must try their best, and seek help as needed, to obtain the highest score possible. They are independently asking to have their mathspro tasks reset so that they may resit a session after reviewing what they have done wrong the first time through.
Students are taking it upon themselves to actively use the manipulatives we modeled and worked with at the beginning of each session when completing their work as needed.
Check out this photo of students working independently all using different modes of learning. Such an amazing thing to see!
This year we are implementing the new NZ Maths Curriculum and using the PRIME maths program in our year 4-8 classrooms. We began the year with a placement assessement that allowed us to determine the best placement for our students into our PRIME maths coursebooks.
After we had PD with someone from Scholastic to talk through the PRIME maths program, I began thinking about my teaching inquiry for this year and the question that I came up with is:
How can I implement lessons that allow students to explore mathematical concepts, using manipulatives as tools for discovery, while also facilitating meaningful mathematical discussions and problem-solving?
As term 1 comes to and end, I can say that I am enjoying teaching through a more structured maths program and I am enjoying the time it provides to focus on how I am going to be working with my students. We are on this journey together and so far, I am very pleased with how we are going as we begin to understand the structure of the program.
After our initial "launch" lesson, we have been working very hard in mixed ability groups to complete our learning tasks. I have noticed that my students are developing a stronger sense of confidence when they are able to discuss their learning with their peers. Students who were already working at Year 3 are now able to accurately discuss their thinking process and many working at Year 1 and Year 2 are becoming more confident asking for further clarification and help as needed.
The next class session (or near the end of the class session), we regroup as a whole class and work our way through the task together modeling how to solve the problems. This has been exceptional especially for students realising how to use our multiple posters to skip count aloud when problem solving with fractions or converting from cm to mm. Many students are now able to use the posters to problem solve independently and others are now able to make the connection between skip counting and solving problems using multiplicaiton.
It's been good to see that there has been a positive shift in student learning levels during the first half of the year (as seen on the graphs below). There were only 7 students out of the class that did not shift in learning levels.
As the year progresses, I will be working to continue to provide opportunities for my students to continue disucssing their thinking and building their own confidence in maths. I am very keen to work with the group of students at Year 3 to solidify their understanding of problem solving with numbers to 1000 while building a deeper understanding of place value to help in their problem solivng.
Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry.
Focus Question: How can I effectively build self-efficacy in my maths students to enable them to clearly share how they got their answer?
The past few years, I have put my teaching inquiry focus into reading and through my inquiry (combined last year with the Manaiakalani RPI programme) I have really found some things that work best when promoting students to feel that they are "allowed to be aloud" when sharing their thinking with others.
I'm hoping to be able to bridge that same principle into my maths class especially when working with my students who are just below year level. This year, I have a lovely group of six students working at Year 3 during term 1 and the beginning of term 2.
The graph below shows their Mathematics PAT score from Term 1 of this year. The red line, shows the average score for a Year 4 student on this standardised test.
As you can see, four of the six students scored at or above the average, while two scored just below the average year 4 student. However, I have noticed that when we are working in a small group, they are very happy to write down their answers but they are not as confident explaining their thinking or sharing their answer orally.
This year, my maths class currently consists of 24 Year 4 students who are all working below year level as of the beginning of the 2024 school year. It is my intention to bring these 6 students up into a Year 4 maths group by the end of term 2. This will allow them to continue to grow in their understanding and end the year working "AT" year level before moving into Year 5 in 2025.
This term, our staff came back together to rethink our Inquiry topics for 2022 now that we are in yet again another "new normal" school year. During the discussion, I shared how my focus has been working with my Year 4 students, who are attending school regularly, to understand the importance of completing their learning tasks. With all of the interruptions to their school year the past few years, these students have never had the opportunity to work in a classroom environment for multiple terms without interruption and as a result the importance of completing ALL learning tasks has rarely been at the forefront of thier learning journey.
I found it interesting that back in March, I indicated that a "Masks Off" classroom goal would be having responsible participants. This is exactlly what I am trying to create in my classroom at this time.
At this time, I have chosen a group of five students from my homeclass that I teach across all subject areas. I will be working closely with these students to set up learning and completion goals for the remainder of the term. I have also started indicated FIOP (Finish It Off Properly) Blogging Goals across my three classes (Literacy, Maths, Homeclass). For this, I make a list on the front whiteboard of the students who have yet to complete a task and once they have completed it, they rub off their name. This helps those who are still learning to manage themselves focus on what to accomplish when they have spare time in class or before school.
This year, I have stepping back into a year 3/4 classroom and I have decided to take another look into reading with my students. However, the focus this time around is centered primarily on working with my students in the Orange, Tourquiose and Gold groups (Reading at a Year 2/3 level).
In speaking with another year 4 teacher at our school during the first Covid Lockdown of 2021, we realised that we both noticed our children reading across these three levels often struggled to express opinions and ideas or deepen their thinking about a text. Generally, these students have basic decoding ability but respond to conversation with one word or short answers. They also do not choose to read without prompting. This led us to believe that the students are not engaging in a meaningful way with the range of literature required to increase comprehension to working at or above their chronological age.
We were prompted by Rebecca’s presentation during the Manaiakalani Data Staff meeting at the beginning of the year to think about how to increase students' responsibility to think critically about what they have read. This led us to wonder how changing teacher scaffolding from supporting literal engagement with the text to supporting more open provoking questions would we be able to move the responsibility for processing the text at a deep level from the teacher to the student. We also wondered if providing more texts of high interest to the students and creating choice in this process would increase movitivation to read longer novel texts. Lastly, if we were to teach our students to use Google apps to create and share their thoughts, opinions and connections to texts in meaningful ways would that increase critical engagement with texts and support students to think deeper about what they are reading and why they are reading it.
Ultimately we decided that our Inquiry goals for 2021 are:
1. To increase students comprehension of novel texts
2. To increase motivation to read novel texts
3. to increase discussion and critical thinking across text types
During our staff meeting the PES teachers took some time to think about planning our 2019 Inquiry into our own Teaching. There were many great points to think about that I thought were worth noting from that meeting.
What am I trying to achieve? A lens through a subject or a subject through a lens?
Each term: What is your mini goal? How can you align your inquiry topic each term with the school topic?
1. Create an inquiry Focus question
2. Research/analyse data from 2018
3. Look into others across the school/cluster who have inquired into similar topics previously-great for getting groundwork ideas
4. Inquire new lines of pedagogy, test, trial, change practice
5. Reflect and share on your blog
6. Be willing to openly share and gain insight from your collaborative groups
Things to think about:
What is the problem? Focus on student needs, how can YOU change their learning?
What can YOU change/do? What do YOU need?
Finding expertise, observations, feedback, etc.
As the year progresses, do you need to revamp or edit your inquiry focus?
