Maths Experiment

My maths focus experiment was to try and guide and support a group of learners through strategy and knowledge workshops.   I chose to do this as they were often self conscious and lacked confidence in their abilities, always relying on using algorithms and they had very little knowledge of other ways to solve problems.  The strategies I used for this group were used with the habitat as a whole and have led to some significant changes in attitude and abilities within our habitat.  

Firstly, we decided to organise our strategy workshops as a series of steps that followed learning progressions.  Each fortnight we have one strategy to focus on and three workshops that work at different levels with different sorts of numbers.  Workshop 1 focuses on the stage 4/5 level of the strategy, workshop 2 is the stage 5/6 level of the strategy and workshop 3 is the stage 6/7 level of the strategy.  During each session the learners are put into the workshop that best suits their learning (determined by a pretest) and half way through the session they have the choice to continue practising their capability in that level of the strategy or move to a different workshop to build on it.  This has given our learns a great deal of ownership over their learning and has made them a lot more self motivated.  The learners who started at workshop 3 are given the opportunity to practise their capability by teaching someone else.  

The other thing we have done is add more materials into our workshops and knowledge sessions.  In all workshops materials have been available, demonstrated and encouraged to support the learners in building new knowledge.  We have stressed the importance of using materials even at stage 6 and 7 of the curriculum and have encouraged different ways of using materials.  

Thirdly, we have used a lot of mixed grouping for problem solving and encouraged learners to teach and learn off each other.  

I'm am super dooper excited about this new way of structuring our maths learning because I can see the buzz it's creating amongst our learners and how much confidence it's giving them.

End of Term 1 Maths

Assessment
Every second Friday we have been doing a pre-test.  This includes ten questions from various maths stages, all of the questions come from the planning sheets on NZmaths.  After the pre-test Lisa and myself mark them and put the learners into workshop groups based on what their gaps are.  Over the two weeks we run workshops that focus on the strategies in the pre-test and each workshop has a slideshow that accompanies it.  The slideshows are uploaded to the class Google site for learners to access for capability practise and to support their further learning after the workshops.

Daily 3: maths with someone, maths on my own, maths writing
We have been encouraging daily 3 with our learners and have a display on the wall to support the language of daily 3.  We have found though, that many of the learners spend all of their maths time playing card games or on Mathletics.  The card games they are playing are often snap or last card so they are not gaining much or practising their capabilities.  Following

Mathletics & Digital Tools
Learners are required to earn 2000 points each week on Mathletics (this number was decided on by the learners).  Activities are set for them that align with the workshops they have been, or will be attending.  They have been given time in class to work on Mathletics however we are finding that many of them are only doing Mathletics and nothing else so at the moment we have limited it.  We are also finding that around half of our learners are not doing Mathletics at home.

We have not started using Studyladder yet however I think next term we should look into this.  Some of the stage 5 activities on Mathletics don't align with the strategies we are teaching them (lots of algorithms which they shouldn't really be doing at stage 5) so it would be good to use Studyladder to fill this gap.

Moving Forward
It'd be good to find a way to keep our workshops going but make them smaller, less learners in each one so that we can use materials more easily.  Also I'm keen to build in a bit more repetition for those learners who find maths difficult and need to repeat the same skills many times in different ways.