How Maths helped my students see their true RFE picture...

Giving my students and authentic purpose to carry out a statistical inquiry strengthens their connections to the task as a whole. This year we have been trying to increase the time we spend reading for enjoyment (RFE). After chatting with Fiona about my inquiry I realised I needed to be regularly monitoring my intervention so that I had concrete data to allow me to measure shifts over smaller periods of time. 

I wanted to find out:

• How much time do you RFE each week?
• What time we are reading?
• Where we read?

The Process:

I found out:

To allow me to gather a fair picture of the time spent RFE I used the data from the 22 students who were present at school for the time period 30/7 - 12/8. This meant that my data was clean as it put everyone on an even playing field as no one had extra time to read, or missed the opportunities that were given in class to read.

From the data I collected I can see that evenings are the most popular time for reading for enjoyment in LS2, with bedrooms being the preferred space. When we unpacked this further I found out that this is the time of day when chores are done, younger siblings are in bed and RFE is used to get some downtime in a quiet space. What I didn't include in this data was that 7/22 students choose to RFE on a rainy day. 

Hours spent RFE increased by 129 hours from 143 hours in week 1 to 273 hours in week 2. This is probably a direct result of our focus on RFE. I can see from data not included that the students who were absent during this measurement period, RFE was not something that is embedded in the reading habits of my students. The overall data paints a good picture as shift did occur. My goal now is to explore ways I can keep this momentum going.

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 

A great way to build connections to Maths vocabulary...

Here's another game shared with us by Marie Hirst, our maths professional development provider. This game is found on the Transum site and is called 'Maths Words'. The idea is that one student stands with their back to the class while the maths word is generated. Once everyone else has seen the word the student turns around and uses the clues provided by their peers to try to work out the word in question. This is a great way for students to unpack and strengthen their connections to the vocabulary as they offer clues without actually using the word.

When I tried this with my group today it wasn't the success I had hoped. I think my students were too shy to offer clues in front of so many people. Rather than stop the game I adapted it on the spot by asking the students to get into groups of three. Once they had done that we split the roles so that one person was guessing the word and two people were giving the clues. I encouraged my students to have Maths Dictionary open to help them define the words generated and derive their clues. This was a huge success!

What I noticed is that my learners do have a good connection to content specific maths vocabulary. They enjoyed having the safety net of Maths Dictionary but tended to only use this to define new words or words they were unsure of. One size definitely does not fit all which is why it really is important to know your learners. 

I'm now looking forward to trying this activity with my more able students as I'm sure their clues will be slightly more cryptic. 

Motivating through Competition...

This week I introduced a new activity shared by our maths facilitator Marie Hirst, into our maths warm ups. Maths Scrabble, a game designed to help learners recall maths vocabulary. The challenge to get the highest score completely won my class over. 

What I liked about this activity was the amount of maths vocabulary that was recalled that wasn't linked to a current focus. One group worked out quickly that words like 'exponent', 'equation' and equivalent' gave higher word scores. I added a component that required the spelling to be accurate so allowed 2 minutes to use the maths dictionary to check the spelling. This was a great way to remind my learners that this site gave great explanations of vocabulary. The image below shows one group waiting to see the final score to see who won. Standing back and watching I saw a wide variety of strategies being used to tally up numbers. The conversation and engagement in the photo below was really exciting to watch. I noticed the students who had already added up their word lists watching and doing quick additions to see if they were going to hold onto their positions. This is a fantastic way to bring maths vocabulary alive!

Maths PD 2020 #2

Today I had a 1:1 professional development session with Marie Hirst, our maths facilitator. I found this really worthwhile as the session was specific to my class. I had asked for support with the teaching my students how to find the most efficient method for answering questions involving decimals.

We began by co-constructing the lesson that Marie modelled. I found this process really useful as it highlighted the gaps in my own content knowledge. The planning formats shared helped me to see how I could help my learners strengthen their own connections to any maths topic. I then observed Marie's lesson and noticed different ways to use both materials and questioning strategies. Afterwards we had a debrief which gave me the opportunity to for both clarity and confirmation.

Here is the link to the notes I took today.

A great idea to share is to have the question prewritten in modelling book without specific numbers (these are added later with post it notes) as this encourages the students to use the maths language to decide what it is they are being asked to do before they are introduced to the numbers they need to manipulate.

Maths PD 2020 #1

We began our school year with a Maths professional development session run by Marie Hirst. It was a great way to begin our 2020 journey as we heard a shared message that helped us unpack what an effective balanced maths programme looked like.

My big takeaways from the day, apart from some awesome ideas to use in my programme were:

• Mathematical communication is using the language in context deepens understanding so need to provide opportunities for this to happen
• Arranging for learning
• Students learn best when they are mixed with students of different abilities
• Mixed ability problem solving + needs based ability workshops
• Needs based groups mean groups are not labelled
• Flexible grouping allows the focus to be on the learning goal that meets the needs of the students who need the information
• Have 'teams' not 'groups' for collaborative challenges
• Unpack 'team' roles one at a time to strengthen connections to what is expected of that role
• Teacher content knowledge is critical
• Equipment allows for visual connections but we need to be able to use this effectively

                                    
Jo Boaler

• Fixed mindset happens with ability grouping when students develop fixed ideas about their learning potential and affects ability to learn.
• Loose confidence.

John Hattie

• Tracking progress sets expectations to students that this is where you perform.
• Teachers tend to teach to that level which locks out components of the curriculum.

Christine Rubie-Davis

• When students have more advanced opportunities to learn they make more progress than they expected they could.

Te Hiku Cluster Presentation

Last week I joined the Te Hiku cluster for their TOD. Apart from meeting some lovely people and taking in the new learning myself, I had an opportunity to present my 2019 teacher inquiry and run two workshops.

Spring Into Maths Reflection...

After our first few weeks of moving Spring Into Maths from a withdrawal group to an in-class programme, my target group are all excited for Maths lessons. By taking time to step back and observe I have noticed these usually quiet students who shy away from sharing their ideas, are now confidently interacting with each other, and appear keen to share their thinking. Actively engaged is not a phrase I would have used many times when talking about this group, but if I was asked to describe their learning today it would have been exactly what I would have said!

Possible reasons for this change in confidence could be linked to: 

• opportunities to strengthen visual connections to the learning through use of materials
• the 'fun' element of maths games
• the small group size
• aligned ability levels has evened the playing field - no one is viewed as the 'expert' so everyone is willing to share their thinking
• following the SPRING format allows for opportunities to revisit learning using different numbers 
• the learning is pitched at the right level
• teacher/teacher aid shared language of instruction
• teacher/teacher aid enthusiasm
• increased self efficacy

After the lesson today I asked two of my target students to work collaboratively to write a description of their learning for this blog post. Their description of today's learning written by students G2 and G5 is below. 

'Spring into Maths is a group that develops and practises basic facts and gives students in the group an opportunity to understand the maths that is hidden in the questions for example - What is ⅛ of 24=?- This question is very similar to multiplication but instead we use the opposite strategy which is division. Today, the Spring into Maths group played a few games that involved addition, place value, and multiplication. We wrote down numbers on the white board and used the place value strategy to help find out the answer. Our warm up  energizer was using the biggest to smallest strategy to sort the number cards out. Next we played maths game to practise our times tables which was called Digi Facts. After that we used the place value house to clarify our understanding of numbers using thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones. Here is an example using the number 689 -600 is the hundreds, 80 is the tens, 9 is the ones. We got all ours right!

We like Spring into Maths because it helps us improve on the areas we need to work on in fun ways. All of us are confident to share our answers because everyone is respectful even if you get the answer wrong.'

Students G2 and G5

An additional element we have added to this programme is a problem solving challenge to help these students strengthen our connections to the maths language we encounter when reading and trying to make sense of written maths questions.  

Spring Into Maths...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to observe Karen, one of our amazing teacher aides, taking a Spring Into Maths session with three of my students who are part of her withdrawal group. What stuck with me the most was the atmosphere in the room. My students were smiling throughout and confidently offering answers to questions, even when they weren't sure of the answer. The latter is something I see happening in the classroom only when they are confident their response is correct. The self efficacy I saw is something I really hope can be transferred back to the classroom.

Spring Into Maths is an intervention program used to provide extra support in number knowledge and strategies for students with knowledge gaps in maths. It is not new to me as I have incorporated this programme into my maths lessons on numerous occasions over the years, however is not something I have been running formally in my maths programme this year. I asked these students what they liked the most about being part of this maths group. Here are their responses:

• JA -  'The games Miss because we can challenge each other in a fun way.'
• AK - 'I like the number challenges because we can try and get a better score than what we got last time. It shows that we know stuff.'
• SB - 'I like being able to say my answer and I don't feel shy because there's only three of us and I really like the games.'

Going forward I am going to rework my maths programme to incorporate the hands on elements of Spring Into Maths into our maths sessions. I saw first hand how powerful being able to manipulate materials is, and see this as another way stronger connections can be made to the knowledge my learners need to be able to operate confidently in a mathematical capacity. 

I began this morning's lesson by explaining the changes I wanted to make to our maths learning time, and as I wanted buy-in from everyone we spent today's session playing the huge amount of number knowledge games that had been most definitely underused in my class this year. The buzz of noise meant this was most definitely not a quiet lesson, and like yesterday all I saw were smiling faces, engaged learners and some outstanding collaboration as they negotiated their answers. 

I'm looking forward to see if this change can help all my students see that they can recall and use their number knowledge skills confidently at speed.

Learn Create Share in LS2

This week we have been creating our own maths games to help us consolidate the language and learning from this term. I decided to use this challenge to reinforce my student's connections to our Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. All the games were created using Google Slides. The games focus on times tables, decimals, addition, subtraction, word problems and doubles, and have been designed to encourage players to use the clues given along with their prior knowledge to find the answers. At the end of this challenge each student presented their game to the class and our special guest, Karen Ferguson. Here is the link to her blog post

Have a look at Jack's, Nevaeh's and Anglea's blog posts for great reflections of this learning.

These games are all on our class site and we would love to share them. 

Strengthening my connections to Inference...

Maths questions include numerical information that when combined with a mathematical symbol (or the text version of this), prompts students to use what they already know to help them make inferences about what they need to do with the information to find the answer. Having had a rich discussion about this with my friend and colleague Sheree Hodge (Ranui Schoo In-school Maths CoL teacher), I decided to dig a little deeper to strengthen my own understanding.

Inference helps students comprehend text. It is the skill of using what you already know to work out what you don't know based on the clues given to help you visualise what is happening. Simply put, inferencing involves using what you know to make a guess about what you don't know. There are two types of inference, default inference (automatic assumptions) and reasoned inference (a conclusion made based on the information available). 'Once students have identified the premises on which they've based their inferences, they can engage in the most powerful part of the process—examining the validity of their thinking.' Marzano (2010).

'Inferences are made when information the author assumes can be logically made are left out,' Carr (1983). We make inferences every day, and often because this is automatic don't realise what we have inferred wasn't included in the information we were given. If we are driving and suddenly the flow of the traffic slows down we infer that there is a problem ahead by exploring possibilities (maybe the traffic lights are short phasing, or someone has broken down or maybe there has been an accident) to make sense of the situation. No one gave us these details but as the traffic flow has slowed we know there is a problem and automatically draw on what we know to be possible reasons to help us explain the situation. In reading we 'read between the lines' to use the information given about a character or situation to visualise what is happening then use what we know to be possible behaviours or outcomes to help us draw conclusions about what might happen next or explain why something happened the way it did. In maths this is no different because written maths is inference. Students have to infer from the language in the written problem what numbers are involved, the number knowledge they require and whether or not they're trying to find a sum or a missing addend. 

From a word problem our learners need to be able to work out what the mathematical problem is first and in order to do this they need to understand the literacy of maths. If you think about this in relation to English, think about how as a teacher you use word studies to grow vocabulary knowledge. We help our learners explore the different synonyms for a word by unpacking the definition and talking about the different ways that word can be used in a sentence. We then scribe the student generated examples to allow our learners to make a visual connection to what this looks like in context. There is no difference in maths. If addition is used as the example, we need to talk about what addition looks like eg: A + B = C or B + A = C and explore the synonyms of 'add' to grow vocabulary knowledge in context. Once we have this knowledge we then need to use it help us make the inferences needed to find the sum (eg: A + B = ____), or the missing addend (eg: A + ___ = C). What I mean by that is once the students have identified the key mathematical words and the numbers they need to work with, they must then use this knowledge to infer what it is they are being asked to do with the information they have.

My next step is to find out if my learners know and understand what inferring means in a reading context, then see if they are able to transfer this knowledge to a maths context.

Readings to support my learning:

• Marzano, R. (2010). Teaching inference. Educational Leadership, 67(7), 80-01
• Carr, K (1983). The Importance of Inference Skills in the Primary Grades, p 518-522
• Making Inferences to Improve Reading Comprehension
• Reading Rockets
• Why you need to teach inference to struggling readers

When a 4 becomes a 5 we celebrate...

For the last year and a half I have watched one of my students who arrives every morning with a huge smile of his face completely fall to pieces and dissolve into floods of tears when faced with any form of assessment. He finds most aspects of learning a challenge but during learning time never lets this take the smile off his face, unless as I previously mentioned the task facing him involves any form of test. I have tried so hard to help him relax and just try his best, but this is something he hasn't, until today, been able to do. The fact that we did his GLoSS test and he smiled the entire way through is the sole purpose for the celebration in this blog post. 

Image by Pexels from Pixabay 

Historically this Year 8 student (B3) hasn't progressed past Stage 4 in the GLoSS assessment, but today with a huge smile on his face, I listened to him confidently explain the strategies he was using to help him find the answers to the questions I was asking him (he even asked me if it was ok to use skimming and scanning skills to recheck the information!). This time skip counting was replaced with times table knowledge, counting on from the largest number was replaced with place value partitioning and equal sharing was replaced with repeated addition, allowing him to finally progress to the long awaited Stage 5! 

We have a well developed routine that follows the same format each maths lesson. My learners are grouped by ability so that they are learning at a level that challenges them, but also allows them to feel successful. The teaching DLOs all have the same layout, with only the content being different. Each group has two guided sessions with me followed by two follow up sessions, one where they work with number properties and one where word problems are introduced to allow the strategy to be used in context. In both learning situations talk is encouraged. Alongside this, each person completes three independent challenges made up of 15 minutes of E-Ako, 15 minutes of levelled basic facts challenges and 10 minutes of times table challenges at a time they choose. This purposeful 'brain break' affords my learners the opportunity to self manage and find success as these online challenges are revision based and not instructional. 

So what has changed for learner B3? His self efficacy has increased because he feels confident in a subject that he feels he is successful in. I know this because I asked him. "I like maths Miss, because it's fun and I'm good at it now because I know how to use my strategies." He is finding success because he is able to complete the follow up work set for him independently. He is finding success because he is asking questions when he needs clarification instead of waiting for me to notice he is stuck, and he is finding success because he is using the vocabulary that allows him to engage in the conversation and share the thinking behind the strategies he has used.. 

Huge congratulations B3 I am so proud of you! 

Mr Wong's Maths Challenge...

Earlier this week Greg Wong shared an awesome resource he had created as part of his teaching inquiry. Today I introduced 'Mr Wong's Maths Challenge' to my to my Maths group and it was met with a huge level of enthusiasm. I have added the link as Greg is happy for me to share it (Don't forget to give him the credit!). My initial thinking was this basic facts challenge would be completed in 15 minutes, however when I called 'time' I was met with a collective, "Miss can we keep going?"

I am very much a believer in capitalising on learner engagement and enthusiasm so we carried on. Greg's randomly generated arrays were designed to support knowledge gaps in basic facts recall. The timed element of competition is how this challenge is able to meet individual learning needs, but on this occasion that took a back seat as rich dialogic discussions about how different strategies suit different numbers and which strategies were the better choice evolved. 

Sharing how we 'Rewind to Remind'...

Here is my first ever screencast. It describes how I have set up my google drive to store my digital modelling folders for learners to access immediately after lessons. Hopefully this will inspire a few more Chromebook teachers to have a go at using 'Rewind to Remind'. 
Fiona Grant captured this process on digitally and will share the work flow early next term.

Here is the link to my site if you wish to see how my learners access our 'Rewind to Remind' modelling clips.




Here is the link to Mele's blog post that explains in her words how we use 'R2R' in our maths time.

Using statistics to create accountability and ownership towards blogging...

In 2013 I wanted to my class to take responsibility for ensuring their completed work was published to their individual blogs, so I asked them to analyse the number of posts they had published over the year. We graphed these results and analysed why some months were stronger than others. This was such a powerful learning opportunity that I have introduced this at the start of each new learning year since then. 

Developing a level of accountability and responsibility for blogging regularly are the reasons behind this task. As the statistics available to each learner are personal to them, this quickly allows each person to make a connection to the learning. Over time I have adapted this task to looking back at blog post totals by year at the beginning of the new school year, as mentioned perviously, to looking at blog post totals by the month in term three. 

This is an amazing motivator as there is no hiding from what is still sitting in Google drives compared with what is published on blogs. The analysis process (done in teacher chosen pairs to help develop new working relationships) promotes a wealth of rich conversation and a healthy sense of competition. I find it really interesting listening to the honestly behind the reasoning why blog post numbers have fluctuated over time. The best part about this learning is the ongoing discussion that emerges afterwards as the analysing continues. I display the DLOs on the wall and find that my students tend to gravitate towards this display as the connections are strong. 

Here is the link to my planning for those interested in trying this in their own class. The links to the student blogs below will provide great exemplars for your students. 

Ofa’s blog, Alex's blog, Sanujan’s blog, Mele's blog, Jeremiah's blog

Some students took this a step further by creating a Screencastify to explain their learning.

    

Rewind to Remind is alive in LS2!

Last year after observing +Chantal Millward using Explain Everything (EE) on her iPad to create a rewindable learning resource, we asked +Fiona Grant to show us how we could include EE in our Chromebook classes. Rewindable learning has always been alive in our learning space, but this year I am making a conscious effort to make this more visible.  +Karen Ferguson shared the 'Rewind to Remind' image with me (an image she too is using this year), so these buttons now have a permanent place on our LS2 class site. 

In my case it has been start as you mean to go on. Using EE as a modelling book is so new to me I am still at the stage of being very aware that I am using it. Natural progression between what I am teaching and recording is very much still a work in progress, however despite the fact I am totally out of my comfort zone, I am using the tool and I love it!

Everyone has to start somewhere, so my somewhere is with my maths group. I have shared with my learners the fact this is my personal learning challenge so they are very supportive. Each time we review the recording I ask for their feedback. Today one student told me I need to 'speak more like a normal lady.' He was not being disrespectful, he just didn't have the vocabulary to tell me I sounded like a robot. He then went on to tell me to speak like I normally do and not to worry about how fast I write the numbers. I think this is brilliant feedback. It shows that I value my learner's opinions and it also shows them that when we are learning something new it is ok to make mistakes. This is definitely a win - win situation.  

Despite the obvious floors in my published EE clip, I confidently guided one learner back to the 'Rewind to Remind' (R2R) button. She told me afterwards that the 'R2R' was a good idea because no one else knew she needed to look at it. I suggested that she have another look at home tonight so she could practise her new learning from today.

To Chromebook teachers who are yet to venture into this realm, I absolutely recommend taking the first step. The speed at which you can upload this to your google drive means that rewindable learning is immediately available to your learners, making it a useable and valuable resource to enhance your teaching program.

Putting my new learning into practise... Awesome!

Last week I went to my first session of maths professional development with Bobbie Hunter. What a fabulous opportunity! So much of what she said made so much sense to me with light bulb after light bulb going on as the session progressed. This year it would be fair to say that the low levels of mathematical ability in my groups have challenged me week after week. I have gone back to the drawing board so many times as I endeavour to help my learners make the important connections to the skills and knowledge needed to allow them to operate at the Year 7/8 level. However despite my continued efforts I have remained completely perplexed with this situation.

A discussion I had with Bobbie forced me to take a step back and think about how my low expectations were affecting the outcomes in my maths lessons. I am very aware of the need to provide learning opportunities that my learners can resonate with, but for some reason I have overlooked the obvious when thinking about what needed to change. Me!

She suggested I let go of the desire to build number knowledge to a level that I felt my learners could cope with and actually provide learning opportunities that ticked the Level 4 boxes of the NZ maths curriculum. By lowering my expectations I was actually hampering my learner's progress. Whilst I have used thinking groups successfully in the past, this year I have completely overlooked this as a teaching tool as I thought (wrongly), that my learners would not be able to actively participate. I definitely had not thought about the fact that regardless of level (in this case ranging from JAM stage 1- 4) that there is so much that can be gained by providing opportunities to 'argue' reasoning and thinking. At no point had I thought about the importance of allowing my learners to engage with their errors in a peer protected environment. 

By embracing the idea that if my learners could explain and justify their thinking they could understand and use I introduced todays problem...

The question(s) I posed were linked to my learner's own worlds through our cluster wide inquiry and our recent camp at Hunua Falls. This empowered everyone from the outset as they could relate to what I was asking them to do. The affirmation came in the form of one student who said, "I understand why you need us to work this out Mrs Anderson. We have to help Auckland save water."

To set the scene I read out and showed a recent mailer I received with my water bill. We tapped into our inquiry knowledge to make connections to the topic then met our new thinking groups. To make sure everyone knew what 1 litre looked like we created a list of what we knew that came in 1 litre amounts. Coke was the most popular so that is the image I grabbed.

With initial connections made my learners took their first tiny steps into the world of problem solving. I told them they could use any strategy, number knowledge or maths equipment they wanted to find the answer. After a slow start this lesson took off. We celebrated every answer regardless of how the answer was found. Then in groups had our first dialogic maths conversations to decide as a group which strategy was the best one. The only scaffolding I put in place was the word 'because' and used the think aloud strategy to model how to state an opinion then use the word 'because' to support my thinking. Surprisingly each group had a different opinion.

Finding out how many litres of water we could save individually per week if we saved 20 litres per day was answered first. After the discussions I outlined above I posed the second part of the problem. 'How many litres of water would LS2 save per week if all 50 students saved 20 litres per day?' Once again I noticed a wide variety of strategies being used. Interestingly a few students were experimenting with the thinking shared in the first problem. I am excited to see where this journey takes us tomorrow...

Silent Challenges...

Some of my favourite lessons this year have been our silent challenges. The idea behind this is that instead of me 'telling' my learners what it it I want them to do, they need to read and understand from a series of written instructions what their task is. By doing this I have encouraged my learners to read for meaning and shown them the importance of making sure they understand what it is they have read. These tasks allowed the collaboration between my learners to shine at it's best.

The challenge below was set only for my reading group. One of the gaps in their learning was reading for meaning when a text is not scaffolded and unpacked. I decided this would be a fun way to show them why this was important and how they could make sense of a text that they had little connection to. To make sure everyone found success I created mixed ability groups so they could support each other. The learning arguments or dialogic discussions that took place were rich and afforded me great opportunities to make some important anecdotal observations.

The rest of the class saw asked for a similar challenge so I created one that embraced our learning in maths and inquiry. Never would I have imagined that 52 Year 7 and 8 learners would be outside testing flight distances and be so on task! The discussions I heard were based on adaptations that could be made to get more distance and were accompanied by laughter, team spirit and outstanding group collaboration.

Building connections in Maths

We spent some time this week looking at how asking questions can help our learning. Below is the list of our own Room 5 'crowd sourced' examples. Our next step is to create a display that encourages questioning during learning time.

What questions that you have asked, or heard someone else ask that have helped you in maths?

• Don’t be scared to come up and ask for extra help?
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions?
• Can you explain your thinking ?
• Do you know what that is.
• Do you get what I mean?
• What strategy should I use?
• Can you say it in a easier way so I can understand?
• Can you help me?
• Do you want be to explain in more detail?
• Does this make sense to you?
• Do you need help?
• What strategy should I use?
• Are there any maths game to help me?
• Is there a website we can practise on?
• Is there a different way to solve this?
• Does this strategy work for me ?
• Is this strategy work with bigger numbers?
• Do you understand now?
• Can you show me an example.
• What is the best strategy to use to find the answer to this question?
• Does this strategy work for me.
• Can you break the strategy down for me?
• How did you use your strategy?
• Do you know how to solve this?