Term 2: Inquiry Update

This term I have been focussing on getting the children to think from the 'author's point of view'. The tasks I got the children to use were agreeing or disagreeing with statements. However, the children had to think from the 'author's point of view' not from their view. This was quite difficult for some children because they had to switch their thinking. It generated good discussion and healthy argument amongst the children and they had to use their books as evidence.

LIteracy Tasks for Reading Followup

Here is a selection of followup tasks that I have been using and practicing in my classroom. Please feel free to use them if you wish. They are suitable for all reading ages and can be changed to suit your own groups.

Term One Inquiry Reflection

My focus has been having followup tasks that engage students motivation in reading. Here is what I have found out so far.

Inquiry Focus in 2016

Welcome back to 2016. At Pt England, our school-wide focus is formative practice in reading and writing to improve students achievement. My personal inquiry will focus on: How to get engaging follow-up activities to increase student motivation in reading.

Final Inquiry Reflection for 2015

The following is data based on end of year gloss testing. This is of my maths class, a total of 28 students, nine of which were in my ALIM group.

Things that I would like to focus on for next year: sorting my groups in to mixed ability, focus on fractions and incorporating strands - geometry and statistics.

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.

Inquiry Reflection Term 3

Reflecting on what am I trying to address and what impact has it had on student's learning.