Recording and Reflecting

Lots of times Ashley and myself get involved in professional talks about Manaiakalani. This time we were talking about 'class on air'. It is a great way of sharing teaching ideas with the rest of the world.

So we decided to film each other and put our lessons on the blog.

It has been a boon to have two teachers in a class and recording each other was not a problem at all. We do not have great tools like the 360 degree camera and microphone to get the best quality, but we are so motivated that we are determined to record our lessons. 

My lesson was a short lesson on Number Talks. My question to students was " what do you know about 1/4 ( a quarter)? 

 This is my first attempt, so please be kind when leaving comments.

Reflection - After watching the video I realised that one students was dominant in the group. I should have encouraged other students to participate in the discussion as well. I should be incorporating more use Talk Moves.

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.