Science Week - Collaborative teaching

What is the power of two in class? Anne Sinclaire often refers to this and I saw this happening beautifully in my class when Ashley decided she wanted to do something in Science. I agreed as I like to do things in science and I also wanted ashley to lead this lesson as she is approaching more towards the end of her collaborative teaching. It also reminds me of what we were asked at the beginning of the year before we had MDTA's in our class.



What is the one most important thing you need to establish at the beginning of the MDTA programme?

• Building relationships with the students
• Establishing the MDTA teacher as a teacher who is in equal partnership with the mentor teacher and not in a student teacher type role.
• Mentor teacher letting go of control and trusting the MDTA teacher with classroom responsibilities and listening to their ideas.

So this week we learnt about the functions of different parts of the body.

This term we have have been learning about how to keep ourselves safe and one of the extensions into the safety inquiry was to make sure that we keep our bodies and the organs of our body safe too.

First we learnt about the functions of the parts of the body. We talked in detail how drugs, smoking and junk food could harm the organs of our body and how we could not be able to learn and be strong individuals.

It was great to see how all children were interested to find out about the organs. Some of the facts like the liver produces acid and that there are 206 bones in our body and that our heart works non- stop till we live etc amazed our kids.

Then Paula Were our literacy PLD lady introduced us to an app. It is known as Anatomy 4D. It is an amazing app and our kids were awed by it.

Then we started to make a model showing the internal organs of our body. This was hard work! and my lovely Ashley (MTDA) became a little stressful!

There was heaps of laminating, cutting, gluing and stapling. Besides some students lost some of the organs that were needed to complete the model. So Both me and Ashley were found saying things like " Where is your heart?" " Did you cut your kidney?" " What happened to the intestine?" " Have you got your lungs?" etc. Usually it became very quiet hilarious.

Finally Ashley made a movie on the functions of parts of the body.

The whole experience was very rewarding both for the kids and their teachers.

One of the outcomes that was a highlight for me was that Ashley led the lesson and the two of us helped the students make their models of bodies. All this would not have happened if the the power of the two was missing.

Changing Ways of Education

We had Home School Partnership this week and we were asked to show how Digital Learning environment helped students to engage and learn better. For this purpose each team had to share examples of learning from their classes. I am in Kia Toa team and here is an example of 'Learn Create, Share with my parents at Home School Partnership.

This lesson was a bit of self directed learning. Students had to make a rocket that could fly and they were given straw and paper as suggested in the 'LEARN' column of the plan. This led them to search on the net and find out the best way possible to make a rocket. This involved a lot of reading, listening to and understanding of articles on the net. Some chose to go on You tube to find out if it was possible to make a rocket out of straw and paper. Then students had to make a rocket and this is the CREATE bit of the plan. Finally they had to share how they had made their rocket using a medium of their choice. Some students opted to make a movie and others wanted to make a presentation. click on the links below to have a look.

Teaching Times tables

It was just a great week of teaching Maths!

The ethos of Learn Create Share is very much a part of all my lessons. This week when I was teaching multiplication tables a student asked me “Why do we need to learn them?” I demonstrated various examples from everyday life about how knowing our tables can help us solve problems faster. We solved problems  using blocks, counters and other equipment. As we went through the lessons during the week, most students had learnt their times tables up to 5. I was feeling good!

Suddenly I heard some students pose multiplication problems to each other! They went “There are four friends and they have four chocolates each. How many chocolates did they have altogether?” I was just thrilled to hear this. Then they decided to make a word problem game out for it. They wrote their problems on a square piece of cardboard and had an illustrated description of their problem at the back of the card. When they had finished they came to me and said “ This is our Create and Share bit for learning times tables.”

My heart melted. I felt truly satisfied to see these students understand the whole concept of timetables which is usually a very abstract idea to start with. I praised them heaps for their effort. Suddenly the idea got viral and everyone wanted to make little booklets of multiplication problems. At the end of the week each student took a booklet home to share with their family.