Wednesday 29 January 2020

Maths, So what?





If we think about Maths and what we have been doing. Do we feel it is achieving all we want for our learners?
Many of our learners need physical materials to connect with the problems they are facing and teacher scaffolding to understand how to use these materials.




We want to maintain all the good things we have learnt in the last 2 years in DMiC the use of open, challenging problems but develop more scaffolding, structure and connection to the progressions. 
As we look into this more we will develop a stronger picture of all the curriculum levels and what it means when creating an OTJ for learners. 

We had many positive things from DMiC:
The power of group norms for all learning areas. 
We were challenges about culturally responsive practice.
We were challenged about the view of ability groups. But we must remember that it is not all or nothing. We must remember to think about who could belong well with whom and work well with whom. We want children to experience working in many different ways. 

Now that we have things that we know work we need to have a scope and sequence for our learning. After looking at the many the team leaders and SMT decided we would use these New Zealand Curriculum Maths Connecting all the Strands. 







Beginning 2020: Never Lose Hope


Russell began the day telling us about his first day and Pt England School and how different the school is now. How much everyone cares and the amount of time everyone has spent making sure we are ready to jump into learning on day one. 


What do we need most in 2020?
This is a question we ask every year and what a big question it is. As we spend two days working together to develop, plan and focus on teaching and learning together. 

It is very exciting that this year we will be using the resources from inside the school and learning more from the experts in our own school. We will be focusing on Math, Reading and of course the Pt England Way.  We will focus in terms 1 and 2 on Maths and terms 3 & 4 on reading. 

We have a school wide focus of "Never lose Hope". We want our community to have hopes and dreams that drive them. We want them to set goals, have aspirations for the future and find what they love.  It is about seeing the value you have and bring to a group. This is a value that we as teacher, our whanau and the children see as important.

How do we plan in these values? Planning and teaching behaviour is important.