Second CoL Meeting - Academic Readings

Unfortunately I was unwell and unable to attend our second CoL Meeting of the year today.

We were asked to do the following before we met:

And these were the quotes I prepared:

I found it interesting, particularly as I am inquiring into Maths already, the line about girls' self-perceptions in Mathematics being related to having higher verbal achievements, when so much discussion within my school has centred around the importance of understanding language to advance Mathematics achievement. It is definitely an area I am looking to purposefully build into my teaching - looking to bridge the gap between the two Mathematics programmes we are using; Numicon in Year 3 to Pr1me in Year 4. They both incorporate Mathematical language expectations for the children, but I need to look into how they are relate to each other across the programmes - as well as the vocabulary mentioned within the new Mathematics Curriculum itself.

I also really reflected on the statement about cultural value placed on Mathematics versus Sports for instance. It is naturally going to affect children, when families show a bias towards one area or another. I suppose as educators we need to balance that; not just favouring Mathematics, but showing how Sports and Mathematics can be equally valuable to the enrichment of our students' lives.

Numicon PD Today

 We had Numicon PD in our school today for the Junior School teachers from Years 1-3. It was really good to get together as a Junior team and start to figure out where to even start with this programme. It has been a little frustrating waiting for the hands on materials to arrive, but we should be able to hit the ground running on Monday apparently!

Numicon has come across as a more confusing system than the Pr1me Maths Programme, in terms of ease of getting stuck in and implementing it in the classroom. I have been more inclined to pursue the Pr1me programme for this reason, but after today I am starting to get excited about what Numicon has to offer.

A lot of the reticence I have felt about Numicon was finally laid to rest today and it really comes down to how to navigate the planning resources on their website. There are a lot of clicks and a lot of steps to even access your lesson (as you can see in the example I have prepared below):

I think I will need to organise the planning accessible from the website into my own planning slides, that I can either print and have hard copy, or at least be able to access from my own Google Drive, as I dislike the thought that I am reliant on internet access to be able to continue with my lessons in the moment. I would also like to see the whole lesson sequence in one glance, so that I can better manage the timing of each lesson component, especially while learning this new system.

I am going to launch into 'Getting Started' next week - which is really a focus on the children getting stuck into the materials and familiar with how to use them. I am hoping to start on the first lesson after Getting Started - 'Numbers and the Number System 1' before we get to the holidays, but we will see how we go!