When do we do Science?

When do we do Science was a question that my BT (Ashley) asked at our syndicate meeting.
I thought about it and instantly knew the answer to it. Because it was the End of the Term and there were lots of things to complete on my mind, I could never get a chance to talk to Ashley about the question she had asked.
This Term we have been studying about 'Whare Tapa Wha' and 'The School values'. Though we did a lot about all our  five school values and researched how we could make these values visible in the school, we had also touched on the science bit through the values of 'Whanaungatanga and Ako'.

We had seen that most of our students brought sugary drinks to school along with their lunch packs. I wanted to discourage unhealthy drinks within my class and wanted them to start getting water bottles to school. For this we started our little water campaign where students were encouraged to drink water other than sugary drinks. To make this campaign comprehensive, students researched about how water was important for our bodies and also read lots of texts about places where water was scarce. We made posters and then our class led to educating other classes about why water was important for our bodies.

So here was our little integration with science into our unit. Hopefully Ashely will read this blog post and will have her questions answered.  But I do agree with you Ashley that we need to look into our units and have a complete inquiry based on a science topic.

Group worthy questions

This Term Sue Pine our facilitator for Maths has shown us how group worthy questions can be a great tool to encourage mathematical discussions among students. So Last week I gave group worthy open ended questions to my class.
The question was - There are some bears and they are going to the picnic in cars. Five bears can fit in a car. How many bears are going to the picnic.
There was lots of thinking, discussion and working out of problems using different numbers.  They drew their understanding of the problem on the paper. But as they became confident, they started enjoying solving problems and asked me to give them some pictures of cars. To my surprise they started to make their own questions using their pictures.
Initially,  students started by skip counting in fives and then slowly worked out their way to find answers to problems involving bigger numbers. For example 100 bears can go in 20 cars so 115 bears will go in 3 more cars and that makes a total of 23 cars. Language associated with multiplication like 'groups of' or 'time'  all became very clear to the students and the best thing was that they all taught each other how to solve the problems. it was a great lesson and I felt a very happy teacher. This is what students did in groups to solve the problems.

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.