Monday 2 November 2015

Alim Impact Day Presenation

I've been privileged to have been part of the Accelerated Learning in Maths 1 programme this year.
A brief overview of the demographics of our school. We are in East Auckland and have a roll of around 650 students. The majority of the children are of Maori and Pasifika background with a small number of Asian and New Zealand European. We are a Manaiakalani cluster school and are a 1:1 digitally immersed. We base our approach on Learn, Create and Share. The resources that I used mainly were from the nzmaths site, figure it out books and the No Nonsense Maths Problem books. One activity that I felt helped with fractions was: Fraction Tagging. My focus question was: "How can I use problem solving with rich tasks to improve the learning outcomes of my target students?"

I initially chose 10 students but 1 student left so I had 9 altogether. The first week was spent setting up a treaty, creating a checklist for students to use when problem solving, having a reflection chart at the end of each lesson and sending home letters to parents.
Grouping students was important. I wanted to split children that were very chatty but also wanted confident children amongst the less confident.

I found that my "Maths Club" became more confident and began sharing their learning in class with other children. They were able to help others too. I also created a google form that I got my students to fill out. Some of the children's responses were that they really loved maths, maths was the only thing they were good at and one student loved maths because he could learn from others.
I mainly focused my teaching around fractions and proportions although I did teach multiplication and division strategies as well.

Thankfully enough, our CAP plan was already in place from previous teachers who had been through Alim so I spent some time going over it again. You'll see the data and my findings in the presentation below. If you have any questions please feel free to comment. Also thank you to Juanita and Sue for helping me along the way.