Maths PD: Jo Knox

Today the teachers of Team 3 were given another opportunity to meet with Jo Knox and spend some time together going over some the areas of maths that we are seeing our students struggling with. She began our session working with a small group of year 4 students to model various teaching methods for us.

Using pictures of monkeys and some beans to feed the monkeys the students discussed various ways to share the beans with the monkeys.   Remembering to remind the students that you want to have a fair way of sharing the beans. After providing some time for the students to think about what they would do, Jo gave them the beans and asked them to share their thinking with the others. Being sure to stop and have the students explain their thinking allowed her to see which stage of thinking they were at while they solved the problem.

ex. If you have 2 monkeys and 8 beans how many monkeys would each monkey get? 

If they are able to easily answer this question, raise the number of beans they are sharing.  Once again provide thinking time prior to having them share their reasoning with their buddy.  Then, if doubles are going well, move them on to 3s, etc.

Moving to Fractions using Equal Groups
Instead of saying 3 monkeys shared 12 beans, move students to understanding that this is 1/3 of the beans.  This achieved first by showing them 3 fractions (1/2, 1/3, 1/4) and asking which would be used for this problem.   Which fraction would be use to make 3 equal groups?

Using Repeat Addition
With another groups of year 3 students, we moved onto solidifying basic facts without using skip counting.  Using the animal strips, make up a word problem. 

ex. Farmer Jo has 6 fields and she has 5 snails in each field.  How many snails does she have altogether?

How could we write this as a multiplication problem?  What if we combined the fields to 3?  Then,  we would have 3 groups of 10.  After doing a few similar problems, ask how many groups of 10s we have compared to groups of 5.  See if they are able to understand that making groups of 10 creates 1/2 the number of groups.

Deriving Basic Multiplication Facts
Using games to practise "rote" learning of facts after discussing with the class how you could find the product using what you already know about the basic "benchmark" facts (1, 2, 5 and 10).

Maths PD: Jo Knox

Today the teachers of Team 3 were given an opportunity to meet with Jo Knox and spend some time together going over some the areas of maths that we are seeing our students struggle with continuously.

First, Jo spent some time talking to us about strategies to use with our students to learn solidify place value understanding.

Create/See/Record:
ex: Going from 29 to 30 without saying 20/10…It is very important to use physical materials with students like packets of 10 (beans/sticks) and place value charts (houses). Jo said that by using discrete objects that have to be physically connected to make 10 students will gain a more concrete understanding. Jo also suggested using the 1000 book to could by 10s, or by 100s from any number. However, you must be sure to use the materials to reinforce the concept.

Develop Place Value Understanding
ex: writing 54 in words We need to be sure that we are providing multiple ways to use a number when we are doing this. For example, add 10, now subtract 20 and go up 5. Then, write the number in words, and the expanded form. However, when doing this, be sure to provide the students with a chart (or Google Draw/Slide) with the words on it. I was thinking that this is something we could easily have set up as a Slide/Drawing that is scaffolded into our daily routine until students grasp the concept. Once students are secure in this process, add it as a weekly assignment and then scaffold in a new version with different concepts on it to do as a group/class.

Using a Daily Maths Wall-Very similar to the "calendar wall" that is done in the year 1 classes by adopting this technique to use with students at their level to repetitively learn over and over the same concepts that need daily revisiting.

Jo then worked with a small group of our students to model some of the ideas she shared. It was during this time that the power of imagery became quickly apparent.  By having the students image after they got a concept with the materials, and then go back to the materials to check it reinforced student understanding.  When adding using double digits it is important to move to stick packets of 10 and do it with the sticks and then imaging again.

It was also very evident that providing the students with the time to describe what a number looks like was so powerful, and as always remembering that dialogic conversations in maths, as well as reading, are so valuable to increasing student understanding.

PD: Making Maths Count-Jo Knox

Today, we had our first staff Maths PD of 2017 with Jo Knox.  We spent the afternoon looking deeper into the different maths stages of the Number Framework.  During our discussions, we looked into the various strategies that a student would use while working at different stages to complete the same maths problem.

When looking at number knowledge and strategy Jo made a few points that I found to be the most important to remember.

• Number and Strategy are equally important. 
• All strategies are dependant on the knowledge needed to successfully complete the strategy.
• When looking at a student's Maths stage, you need to remember that they are about how a student chooses to solve the problem using that stage.

These are all such great reminders as we prepare to begin assessing our students' using the GLOSS test for their reports at the beginning of Term 2.