Wednesday 13 August 2014

Challenges in Math

Having a Y4/5/6 class is a great challenge as a teacher as I am constantly looking for open tasks that challenge all my students wherever they are.

Have been having a bit of a focus on maths lately and a few sites have been helpful but generally there is a HUGE lack of rich math tasks online. I found this really surprising! I am used to finding whatever I need/want online.

Anyway.... check these out.

http://nrich.maths.org

http://mathpickle.com/K-12/Videos.html

Am also adding

https://www.khanacademy.org - lots of how to videos that poppets understand better than me. Account easy to make, especially if you want to sign in with gmail or Facebook.

http://www.dragonboxapp.com

(I haven't used dragon box myself yet but highly recommended by some alternative educators I know. Will be setting up one of my year 6 boys with an account as he wants to learn algebra! The other year 6 boys is going to do Khan Academy.)

Advise all teachers to have a Khan account too! It's good for you!

Friday 1 August 2014

Pepeha, Acknowledgement and Humbleness

I am humbled and valued today!
Our Maori language expert was in today.
He sat with me after his session to share with me that he was very impressed with the  pronunciation, commitment and ability of our learners (including me!) in picking up this complex mihi he has provided us with!

A week or two ago he arrived to teach us a graphic way of remembering the components, only to find, we had already employed the exact strategy he wanted to show us - and to great success!

We have been utilising visual cues (from The Writing Book) in our writing and we had the idea to use  them to remember each line of our mihi.

So we all have a coloured strip of paper with circled stick figure images that trigger us to remember the part we are up to.

We are ingenious apparently!

He also made a point of acknowledging my part in the improvements in attitude, behaviour and engagement of some of the more infamous members of our learning environment.
That is just the pep one needs every now and then!

#feelingblessed