Numeracy Term 1

I feel I have got my maths rotation working reasonably well so thought I would try to open it up with getting the class to have a go at one of Dan Meyer's 3 Act Tasks. The task was about a team mascot - Bucky the Badger, doing press-ups at a game.

http://thescamdog.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lg_bucky.jpg

Instantly having shown the video the children were engaged in the task. They first had to come up with a question they wanted to find out, and as a good task should, the question that sprung to everybody's mind was how many press-ups Bucky had to do in total.

Working in groups of 2-3 they had to try and solve their question. I let them have a go at discussing and figuring out a method to solve the problem. Some instantly jumped to a conclusion and answer without working through a process so was interested to hear how people in the group would react. As a consequence I heard group with discussions going on where children were trying to justify what they thought. After about 10 mins I got the class back together and we added in some extra random scores of field goals and drop kicks to see how that would affect the overall total of press-ups. This helped some who were struggling a bit to try and work through the problem in a more methodical fashion. At the end of the lesson we watched the 3rd part of the video which showed how many press-ups Bucky had actually done. There was only 1 group who accurately solved the problem but this seemed somewhat irrelevant as most of the children had been really stretching their brains, discussing methods, justifying their thoughts, and were generally very engaged.

There were a number of students scattered amongst the groups who I noticed never really got interested in the task. Generally these were the less able students for whom the maths was just too hard. In hindsight I think I might leave this type of task still as a group focussed activity so the less able will be able to go through a similar process but at not such a challenging level.

Next Step: To get the kids to somehow record their processes and findings to be able to share with others.

Week 7

I am feeling I haven't quite made the changes I would like to have done by now in my Maths programme but have focussed more on trying to get my literacy working as I would like.

I have attempted to do another of Dan Meyers 3 Act tasks but limited it to the top groups. I realised after the first attempt that his tasks really are a bit beyond my lower achieving groups. These groups do seem to enjoy of having the challenge of something they need to think about more carefully.

This week I am going to have a couple of the groups recording how they solved one of their follow up activities with the ipad or flip. This is a process I would like each child to regularly do each week.