Number Talks

Number Talks were introduced to us by our Maths facilitator, Sue Pine. These are extremely easy to do and are of an immense value to our daily Maths programme. My co- teacher Ashley and myself devote 10 minutes of our Maths time to number talks everyday. During this time students are asked to work out a problem mentally in their head. It is interesting to find how students derive their answers. It gives an insight into what strategies students are able to use and how efficiently. It is always good to visually represent the different methods used by students as this allows them to learn  other strategies from one another and also allows students to show their mathematical thinking.

Here is what we did in our class to introduce number talks.
We asked our students what do knew about the 1/2.  The answers that we got are in the picture below.

Here is a video  from Jo Boaler that will facilitate the idea of Number talks further.

Reading Together

I have been doing the Reading Together Programme for a few years at my school now. But this time

was a  very different experience for me. I had one very keen Burmese family attend the programme. Both Mum and Dad know very little English. They can hardly converse in English and when I was talking about the effective ways of reading to kids I could see that both the parents were not understanding what I was saying. They have children who are 7 and 6 years old. When it was time to read with the children, I thought that it would be very hard for the parents to read for their kids. But to my surprise Mum started reading slowly and asked her son to read alongside her so that they both could read together. When they came across a difficult word the whole family tried to sound it out and then they read and re-read to make sense of the text. They collectively read the story and enjoyed it. If they all got stuck on the word, they would ask us. It is very rare to see such kind of enthusiasm. We all were  amazed and definitely inspired as they set an example for the rest of us.