With the exercise of blogging, you often tell yourself that you will do it on a consistent basis. That has not happened and a lot of it has to do with my Teaching being on the road and not having a classroom to set myself up in.
There have been countless opportunities to Teach, observe, and Learn from the colleagues I work with and the students I see at Queen Victoria PS and Nelson Mandela Public School. I feel honoured to be in this role, even though I often stumble through when I explain my role to people who ask what I do. To be honest, though, I am stumbling a lot less these days and take that as a positive sign.
Numeracy
This will be a topic of another post, as I do more reading and reflecting on the paradox of students learning or not learning how to multiply. Alan Malolos, a former K-12 Coach and I were looking at the multiple ways students might approach doing a Multiplication question.
For a number of students, they see Math as an operation of repeated addition:
When I begin to dissect some of the confusion around multiplication and really think about it, we should be able to offer our students multiple entry points for understanding.
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| This assumes that the students have an understanding of Place Value. If we want to get technical, this has to do with understanding the Distributive Principal of multiplying.
To quote the Nelson Education Math assessment, Leaps and Bounds, this principle means "that to multiply a x b, you can multiply a by the parts of b and add the products."
But what if you are having problems knowing that six times six is thirty-six? This is a good question that needs to be explored. I learned that 6 x 6 was 36 from memory and did not explore how a group of 6 could be added six times to get 36 or I could learn how to skip count, 6 times, to arrive at 36.
Beyond simply memorizing the tables, we are hoping that students will develop an appreciation of the way Multiplication has a particular framework. I have been guilty of rushing in and suggesting particular approaches for solving questions but I am not quite sure the students grasp what they are doing, even though they may get the answer correct.
This is another approach using the Distributive Principle. I don't think it needs to be capitalized but it seems important enough that is should be.
Patterning
In this role, I am lucky to visit so many different classrooms and see a lot of exciting Teaching that offers up students multiple entry points to understand different topics. In a classroom I visited at Queen Victoria PS, I saw a teacher showing students how they could build models, with cubes, based on patterns they were investigating.
I really wish I took more photos and documented more students learning but I was able to snap a few photos.
I think the lesson began with Ms. Scott asking her class to build an example of a growing pattern, using the block provided. Two students came up to model what they built and she then proceeded to create a table recording the patterns.
 
In this case, the pattern rule was n to the power of two or "start at 1 and square each time"
There were many other cool designs I got to see and these are only a fraction of them. I will make a deliberate and determined effort to circulate around the class more to capture the Learning.
  
Measurement
My final example for today looks at this really innovative, project-based approach to consolidating learning with some aspects of the Grade 8 Measurement strand. Ms. Baker (Nelson Mandela PS) gave the students the freedom to design a park that had to fall within a particular perimeter. She wanted the students to demonstrate their understanding of the Circumference of Circle, the ability to apply the Pythagorean Theorem in their design. It is probably better just to show a couple of images of the final copies being worked on. I will be sure to post some additional photos, once they are done or in the process of being completed.
 
I am thoroughly enjoying the learning I am taking away from the colleagues I have met this year. Thanks.
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