Term 3 - Intervention Implementation!

We had our CoL meeting this afternoon at Panmure Bridge School. It was a really nice chance to share our Inquiries and korero around the challenges we are facing and where to from here?

I enjoyed sharing my Inquiry from 2024 with a colleague who is just starting out on her BSLA learning journey and questioning, as I did last year, how to push comprehension when you have to focus so heavily on phonemic awareness.

But, back to 2025 and Mathematics!

I have had time over the school holidays, and while observing my class under a student teachers' full control, to consider how best to implement my Inquiry intervention, while following a structured mathematics programme (in this case Numicon). 

While writing the students' report comments and talking about our focus in Mathematics with the parents at our Parent-Teacher conferences last term, it really does come back to understanding our concepts through the language of mathematics. I have been thinking this language over, while hearing senior management talk about learning intentions being understood by our students and in 'kid-friendly speak', I am intentionally teaching some more complicated language to the children so that while some of my learning intentions might not appear to be 'kid-friendly', we have in fact unpacked them as a class so that they should be able to explain what they are learning if and when asked. Exposing them to higher level vocabulary can only be a good thing surely?

Anyway, what is my intervention, and is it regular and measureable?

I am trying to balance the juggling act of all the must do's, supposed to do's and nice to do's, and this is only looking at the subject of mathematics! Numicon comes with Assessments called Milestones. I know from conversations with my colleagues that when we first looked at doing these in our school, they appeared quite overwhelming - it is impossible to do them on every student, on a one on one basis within a testing week. They are ongoing teaching and learning check-ins as units are taught.

With this in mind, I am designing tasks within Explain Everything, that are to happen on a Friday, within which students are assessed on the appropriate milestones for the week, while being required to record their voice using and explaining the target vocabulary and big idea learning from that week. 

Staying on top of implementing these - and training the children up! - is going to be my big challenge for the term. Children away on Friday's for instance will need to be given a catch up time - possibly before school in the morning or in some of my release. Therefore I need to keep these tasks short and sweet while targeting the key learning effectively.

Stay posted for how this plays out over the course of this term!

This is 1 of 7 pages of Milestone Checks for a Year 3.
It can seem quite an overwhelming assessment tool to implement effectively!