Maths is everywhere all the time!

The last day is here and I am kinda sad, well actually I am very sad! What am I going to do next term? I will miss the professionalism of this group and all the knowledge, fun, challenges and new stuff.  Although I can now see time on my hands to go back and re visit all the stuff, treasure, valuable goodness that has been shared....I wonder if I could still get a day off every three weeks to just explore and continue to learn?! Have a feeling there will have to be wine involved in that one!

I enjoyed today's morning focus and the share element of our world. I do enjoy sharing or watching the kids share. There is something special about watching engaged children chatting about an idea you have just given them. The way you can see the cogs in their brains turning over and connections being made, possible one of the true joys in teaching. I have enjoyed watching my confident maths goers share their learnings, especially when their learnings were not what they thought they were going to be. It has been great to watch the less confident mathematician share ideas that have surprised themselves, and the confident ones.  One of the biggest wins for me has been the doing the maths talk as a warm up and then getting the children to share their thinking on a slide show. This allowed my to front load, do a bit of explicit teaching, maths discussion and then see the children understanding through their reflections...oh and it ticked the blog box! My kids are very fast at blogging now too! Here are some examples...I will work on embedding!

No I have lost my chain of thought! been a bad day for technology - I was late arriving due to having to talk to boys about using a toilet - they are like ten - what is that about?! And I couldn't get into the breakout spaces, then my mic for the google vids won't work and now I can't work out how to embed a couple of my maths talk slide shows. Must be go drink a gin time.

I have taken away a lot of great things from this time, (planning, maths talk, digital activities, AI games that I created, TIP charts, curriculum knowledge, sharing, misconceptions, maths is everywhere all the time)  and am sad to see it come to an end. I am looking forward to continuing to grow as a teacher, especially when it comes to maths and feel an passion not to give it up next year. I am bidding farewell to some of my other responsibilities - I haven't told my boss that yet so let's keep that between ourselves - so I can make maths, my class programme and the team I look after my priority. I think there is too much here to just let go of and move on, I want to keep the momentum in my mind set going. Maybe I will even keep blogging....

Thank you ladies!

What's the chance?

 Well another MPI day has flashed passed in front of me. As I walked into the staff room at morning tea time, I sighed, a big heavy sigh. Another teacher commented 'Oh, another grumpy day at school'. I was quick to correct them and let them know I wasn't grumpy and that is was more a positive sigh as my head was filling up with more ideas about maths. I have always loved maths but this MPI course has supercharged that love and now, as a not so smacked on maths minded human, I can confidently say I don't only love maths I am beginning to live, breath and devour maths! I have always been a "I could teach art all day every day" kinda teacher. Now I am a 'I want to teach math's all day' kinda teacher with the underbelly of "Let's do it through art!" Now if that class was outside, I would be happy!

I had lots of fun over the last couple of weeks doing the maths talk in my class, I did target number and what doesn't belong. The children and well into the rhythm of how they work and we are blogging about it each week which tick that other box. The engagement has been great to watch, especially from those who at the beginning of the year firmly believed that they hated maths. Maths talk has opened a world to them that involves them and they succeed at.  When I presented Choral Counting at the latest MK Summit, it was a bit of a disaster as my slide show didn't work, so I winged it! It was great to hear the teachers say they loved the idea and were going to use it in their own class the next day. A number of them took away my examples to and genuinely  seemed to enjoy the session. I was chuffed, not because of me, but because of the enjoyment they saw in maths and how something so simple could help them. Thanks MPI!

Anyway - today - so much once again. Love the idea of data cards and the nz census site - I have already shared that with my staff and can't wait to get them into my class. Today was such a refreshing look at the statistics and how it can be in the class, I loved the slow reveal and the questioning, the PPDAC (which I had never heard of) and interactive sites and all the rest. Farewell to the simple bar graphs of how we get to school - they are as bad as the pizza and fraction nightmare!  

Thank you again ladies! You deserve a wine!