Thursday, 27 July 2017

Week 1

As I write this for the second time I'm wondering about my choice of Blogger as a recording platform, arggg.
In the first week of ALiM I spent getting to know the students and developing rules and expectations. They each received a new big math book and a personal deck of cards. The cards are their daily homework. This week I taught them Memory and Place Value Battle to help grow their understanding of bigger numbers.
 As we were learning to add and subtract using 5's and 10's we played some other more physical activities which help with some of my more energetic boys. We did outside hopscotch skip counting and played a very popular game where they had to throw hackysacks into a target area with scores of 5, 10, 15 and 20. They students then had to add them up, check each other. This also gave us an opportunity to find combinations of 10 and other tidy numbers when adding up.
With my in-class group we have been focussing on learning the times tables and growing their range of number strategies. I also have been giving them some prior knowledge about whole class work to build their confidence.

Tuesday, 18 July 2017

ALiM 2017

I am a teacher and Maths lead teacher at my school and have just completed the training for ALiM (Accelerated Learning in Mathematics). This is an inquiry approach to giving students who are just below in Maths a boost through trying things (based on research) that you have never done before. The aim is to change these students outlook on maths as well as accelerating their maths learning.

I will use this blog to record my journey.

ALiM Year 1 Inquiry: ‘What is acceleration and how do we achieve it?’