Maths - Ideas & Insights

 How can we make changes to the way we teach Math without adding stuff on teachers already heavy load and giving the impression of piling making more work? 

Adding in 10 minute activities can effectively embed change.

"Delve into Maths"

What can we do to give all kids an opportunity to access the competencies and dispositions? Procedural Fluency - Times Tables etc (parents perceive as giftedness) This area is falling. Right side - Adequate Reasoning and Productive Disposition. Pepper the week with these activities.

If you can lock in conceptual understanding, then kids won't forget Procedural Fluency.

Adaptive reasoning is explaining thinking - top kids can't explain. Productive disposition is translating it to their language. There are 4 types of problems and raising awareness of these with teachers is where you get the bang for buck in accelerating learning.

If we want kids to accelerate in math we need to aim for the green - the open-ended and unfamiliar.

Every kid can problem solve.

Rapid routines can keep the other areas alive when they're not the strand being learned at the time, thus helping with retaining.

 

Matific - Kelsey

Last week while I was off… I met with the Matific guru Inba to secure a free month on Matific for my math class.

The program is super easy to use, links to curriculum and from what I am seeing the students are in love with it! They are going on it at home and are motivated to get the top number of stars for each learning game they are playing.

This is what the students see when they log on:

I love the language of math missions and the layout is clear and easy to follow - students are not overwhelmed with what activity to chose or spend learning time deciding what to go on. They also collect monster cards when they have achieved a number of points - a sort of reward program within the game.

The episodes are colourful and interactive. The programing is easy and up to date digitally (knowing what I know from my UI/UX design partner). It has won a number of awards for visionary pedagogy and best practice. Also, you can send home reports to parents and assign homework and school work on awesome islands.

Here is an overview of the program:

The thing that I love most about it is that you can preview the episodes before assigning them to the students. This way you can see exactly what the students will be doing and therefore what they will learn or practise through the episode.

Here is a link so that you can have a free trial and play with the program.

https://www.matific.com/nz/en-nz/resources