Working with Louise and the Prep/One team has been a rewarding and at times daunting experience. It really affirmed to me that we are not the experts; we are there to help our colleagues and their students in any way we, or they see fit. When I began working with Lou, I asked her in what ways could I best support her and her students.

Some of the things she wanted assistance with or had questions about were:

• What is the best lesson structure for junior years?

• Help with lesson planning and resources and

• How can I plan open ended lessons for prep students?

At the first PMSS Professional Learning block, Tony Flack told Pete and me that you have been given a gift of time and not to feel pressured to have all of the answers for staff. This was a perfect example of this; I was able to tell Lou that I would use some of my time to look into best practice examples of Maths lesson structure in the early years. I was able to show her some resources we had learnt about including Maths Talks which have now become common practice in the junior classes. After reading the article Ways that relentless consistency and task variation contribute to teacher and student mathematics learning by Peter Sullivan, Janette Bobis, Ann Downton, Sharyn Livy, Sally Hughes, Melody McCormick and James Russo, we decided on the following lesson structure:

• Pose a challenging problem without instructing on solution methods;

• Allow students time to engage with the task by themselves and in small groups;

• Differentiate the task with enablers and extenders; and

• Orchestrate classroom dialogue between students, emphasising students’ explorations and mathematical thinking.

Before teaching, we started by looking at the P/1 teams term overview and looking at what area they were focusing on over the next few weeks. The P/1 team felt like they needed to continue working on Numeration as they felt that their students didn’t have a great understanding of the content taught. After consultation with Louise we decided to make a checklist for observing students based on a George Booker’s scope and sequence. This would allow the teachers to assess students understanding through work tasks without creating extra assessment pieces and adjust their teaching for the following day.