I have met with my group today and discussed how my Inquiry is going for this point in the year.
I found Term 2 a very distracting term that did not allow me as much of a chance to focus on my Maths programme as I would have liked, due to having a Student Teacher in for five weeks (I wanted to keep things consistent for her sake and didn’t change things up too much). I also had the distraction of being asked to contribute my ideas and thoughts to the new Sunshine Decodables programme, that was in the process of being put online. - This culminated in me going into the Sunshine offices in the last school holidays to record some videos of how I have been using this programme in my own classroom practice. You can view these here.
Back to my original goal of improving my Maths teaching and the children’s learning, I am excited by some changes I have recently implemented in my programme. Trying to motivate the children to stay on task, I have discovered some very useful and engaging resources as part of the Teacher Support Material, available through MathSeeds (which I trialled through my Reading Eggs membership). These are aligning nicely with my teacher-led lessons from the NZC books we are using in our school.
I have seen some pleasing improvement (which I largely put down to our regular use of XtraMath in the classroom) in mid-year testing with many Stage 2-3 students achieving Stage 4 in Additive Thinking in their JAM tests.
This leads to where I am focussing for the second half of the year - improving knowledge and ability in Multiplicative Thinking and Fractions. I look forward to working closely with my colleague Sonali Carter, to plan and implement engaging lessons that achieve measurable shift in these areas.
