Professional Development: First Aid

Safety in the workplace is extremely important so knowing how to keep our students safe is an important for teachers. This week our staff updated their first aid qualifications together over two afternoons. Our four hour training course was run by Bronwyn from Actions for Survival, and was both really informative and really interesting. 

Important Takeaways:

DRSABC - Keep yourself safe first... this is the most important point to remember 

30:2 ratio when giving CPR (30 compressions: 2 breaths)

• Adult: 2 hands
• Child 1-8: 1 hand
• Baby: 2 fingers

6 puffs of a reliever pump per 6 minutes to help control an asthma attack

Amplifying Basic Facts: Manaiakalani Toolkit...

This afternoon I took part in the Amplifying Basic Facts toolkit lead by Donna Yates and I'm really glad I did because I came away with a lot of great ideas to implement in my maths program. 

The focus:

• How to teach multiplication /division basic facts.
• How to amplify and turbocharge the teaching of the basic facts.

Donna shared the message from Jo Boaler's  that more often than not we create 'maths anxiety' in our learners by expecting them to be able to recall the basic facts in 4 seconds without taking time to ensure we have helped them grow their understanding and number sense. To lessen the chance of this happening we need to introduce strategies using equipment to allow for visual connections to be made, provide opportunities for our learners to practice these strategies using contexts they can connect to, before we ask them to be able to recall from memory. 

Strategy

'Basic facts should not just be rote-learnt in isolation from understanding. There is little point knowing what 6 + 7 or 7 × 8 is, if the student has no concept of addition or of multiplication. Teaching needs the joint foci on developing understanding as well as memory.'

Practice

'Doing a wide variety of work that aims to build and enhance strategies, helps reinforce procedures, and understanding of mathematics.  Practising strategies also reinforces and continues the process of memorisation.'

Memorise

'This should only come after the students understand the operation, and have some strategies for performing it.'

Donna shared a wide variety of online programs and virtual manipulatives to help us provide the multimodal learning opportunities needed to help a wider audience make their connections. I really enjoyed the hands on opportunity to explore these.

                        

Image from Donna's presentation 

My Takeaways:

• Recall comes when good foundations are laid and understanding grows
• Make use of at NUMPA Book 6
• Continue to grow understanding of the literacy of maths
• Incorporate virtual manipulatives into my program
• Use images to 'find the maths'
• Basic facts should not be rote learned in isolation from understanding
• Continue to use the real worlds of our students with written maths questions to allow connections to be made in context and with understanding.
• Make a virtual maths manipulatives slide so these can be accessed any time by any one from a known place

Resource Links:

• Array Display - a site that shows what times tables look like when drawn as an array. It has the function to change the order of the factors and show what the array would look like as a division.
• Donna's Multiplication site - so many great links here
• Maths Eyes - finding the maths in images 

Student Design for Learning: Naomi Rosedale

Our T3 Manaiakalani 'create' staff meeting began with Naomi Rosedale sharing some of the findings of her PhD research. There were two of the key messages that resonated with me and became my takeaways. 

Firstly, I realised that I had not ever given thought to mismatched images and text. This very quickly became our next planned cybersmart lesson as I need my learners see what this looks like. After exploring this online and strengthening our connections to why our text and images needed to have a connection we decided this was an important message to share.

Fau and Liletina 

Chris and Sakshi

Secondly I was stunned by the graph that showed how often we fall back on the known of slide presentations. I had recently made a point of driving home the missed opportunities of voice recordings so thought while it was fresh in my mind I would revisit this in depth. I borrowed one of the online references in Naomi's presentation as it fit in perfectly with our science/reading focus. 

The challenge for my learners was to create a Screencastify that focused on the learning of why scientists must carry out fair tests when experimenting. I reminded my learners that the voice I wanted to capture was not about the process they went through on the online challenge but rather about the knowledge they acquired from completing the task. The slide below is from my teaching DLO.

Florence, Haylee and Sakina have given me permission to share their DLO.

Screencastify recording of the girls' thinking

Professional Development Updates...

During the Level 4 Lockdown, which now seems so long ago, I took advantage of several online professional development opportunities that were offered. Distance learning in LS2 was about doing what we could to keep our learning going, so that's exactly what I did. 

Hapara Champion Educator:

This online course took about 15 hours and was well worth every minute. I finally has time to fully explore the Hapara Dashboard under guidance but at my own pace. I have had access to the Hapara Dashboard for many years but was not using it to its full potential. I found the teaching DLOs in the course to be really useful and referred back to these several times. Having never used Workspaces before I had fun learning how to create a Workspace, add html to the cards to change the look of the font, and create moving headers. The latter being something I will add into the next Workspace I create as I learnt from the Hapara online community after I had completed the course. Here is the link to the Workspace I created https://j.mp/35egNGP. Ironically the most challenging part for me was recording the three minute Screencastify that accompanied my completed Workspace when I submitted it. They say practise makes perfect so after five attempts I'm now almost a Screencastify expert!

Using retelling to support comprehension, oral language, and writing:

This webinar run by Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey was fantastic! They shared some really practical ideas to help students develop retelling skills. My favourite takeaway was the Story path. 

After reading you lay down a pathway of prompt cards. The students move through the pathway using these cards to retell the story by standing on each prompt. I introduced this activity to my group who find most aspects of reading a challenge the day we returned to school in Level 2 and they loved it. Instant success as these students weren't simply trying to sit in a chair and remember the story, they were instead interacting with the resource in pairs, retelling the important events by walking through the pathway and responding to the prompt cards.

This activity was so popular we created our own version for non-fiction texts. This was equally successful and is an activity that encourages everyone to actively participate. There are no 'scary' parts as each person only has an audience of one during the risk taking part of sharing initial thinking. 

STEPSWEB Teacher Module

We have run the STEPSWEB program in our school for a number of years as additional support program for students who need extra literacy support. In the past this has been done through withdrawal groups and was something I had almost no connection to. At the start of the Level 4 lockdown STEPSWEB opened up their site and program to all our students. This was not only very generous of them, but hooked me in immediately as I saw the benefits for my learners. 

I completed the 90 minute teacher module and am so glad I did. This program has a wealth of word lists within it that allow the students to practise spelling rules and phonics while growing their vocabulary knowledge. There is also an option to personalise word lists. Since then I have regrouped my learners and have been able to set challenges for all my students that align with what we are learning in class. 

Symphony Math

This is a new adaptive learning program that we have introduced in our school. I took part in a training session on Zoom to learn about the features of this program. This program is now a permanent part of our maths lessons and challenges all my learners at their own levels. What I really like about this program is the option to hear the questions as you read them. This is an invaluable tool for those learners who struggle with reading the instructions.