Tinkering with delivery

Hot after my first MPI session, I'm eager to enhance my Math program! It might be week three, but week one barely counted with only being two days... and week two was a short week with our Waitangi Day long weekend. So essentially, we're still very much establishing routines!

I'm finding the transition to whole-class teaching in Math tricky, with having different extreme levels working at drastically different paces. I need to 'change a few things up' to make it work more effectively.

Ignition task

The first addition I made was to have a Math Talk image up to stimulate thinking and discussion as the learners transitioned into the classroom. My Home Class is a Year 5 & Year 6 class, while my Math class is a straight Year 5 class, bringing together learners from three different classes.

Here is the Image I used for the transition:

Students were asked to enter quietly and just think about what they notice and what they wonder.

Once all the learners had arrived, I invited the class to share their thoughts. The highlight for me was seeing one of our learners who struggles give a fantastic description of what he noticed.

Another highlight was one of the more able learners making a mistake... which became a fantastic learning opportunity for them to check their thinking.

Rewindable Images on our site

One of the issues I consistently ran into last year, when I was a Classroom Release Teacher, was not being able to quickly access the appropriate lesson in the Textbook or Workbook, let alone find the right page. Often, I'd have issues logging in to the providers' websites. I'm trialling bypassing these issues by having them on the class site. This will also alleviate the issue of holding kids back who are ready to move on, while I am scaffolding the strugglers to support them through the lesson. I envision it being great for the TA's to see the bigger picture of the lesson, too. Hopefully, the teacher releasing me today can give some early feedback on how the inclusion worked.