11 03 2009
Think, Talk, Show
was the big message (for me at least) from yesterdays Numeracy PD with Shona Burrough. I took hand written notes…now I have to produce them digitally for this…double handling, but really probably a good way of reflecting on the learning.
We were mostly hands on, problem solving and visually producing one maths example in many different ways. l have always loved maths, both learning it and teaching it (altough university algebra really started to challenge me almost a bit too much!!!) I am so ingrained in the methods that I learnt way back when..that trying new methods, (or rather alternative to what I personally find fastest and successful) gets me thinking… which is of course exactly what we want the kids to do. Of course ‘way back when’ we learnt the “Laws” (associative, commutative, distributive) which we still teach (different jargon now) and I learnt to apply them appropriately…which is what we do now but of course with much more practical, hands on, problem solving methods rather than the chalk and text book methods of the 60’s and 70’s.
Shona had some great examples of how to prepare lots of practice work. Once the kids know what would be expected (after good teaching of course) then the process could be very successful. I need to adapt the examples down to year1/2 levels and have a go in my maths teaching.