Planning in Agency

I like to keep my planning quite open and be guided day to day by what the agents find difficult or too easy the day before. However in saying this an agency session does have a daily rhythm that looks like this:

	Monday
Hot Spots/Daily Basics/Maths Eyes	Quick subsitizing song Doubles doubles song My dog fraction
Song/Game	Make a tower to ten game - groups of three
Professional Development Activity	Professor - Using dominoes to make number stories - professor to model using the giant domino to make up the number story. Focus in on the use of the pattern and begin to talk about starting from the biggest number. Begin to focus on counting on for those that are ready. - Work in groups of three
Client	Teacher in role... Painter - help something is helping with my paint, half of the paint keeps disappearing from each can.
Villain	Captain Fraction
Word Problem	Arrrrr….the painter had 8 cans of paint and I have taken half of the cans, how many does he have left? (focus in on agents using materials to solve the problem, or their doubles knowledge by drawing a picture.)
Talk move focus	Cowgirl calculation - focus on how do you know? Do you agree, disagree with the agent before you?
Strand Link	Focus in on statistics. Probability - how many times do we roll a five http://www.curriculumbits.com/prodimages/details/maths/singledice.html
Reflection Handwrite
Where to next? Handwrite

I like to have a focus in some shape and form on subitizing. I find this focus really builds a deep understanding of number and assists greatly with basic fact knowledge that will be needed later on. Our sessions will also have a strong focus on materials and visual strategies.

At the end of each session I will write quick notes to myself and tweak the next days session if needed. I will then use these notes to guide my next week's planning.

I have been really impressed by how much my agents have grown with their agent talk moves. They are now able to state if they agree or disagree with the agent before them and able to articulate how they solved the problem. Cowgirl Calculation will reinforce and scaffold this and is often heard to say "so you are saying..." Having Cowgirl revoice what they have said builds greatly on their own abilities to talk about the strategies they have used.

Comments

ThinkSRSD - my journey so far with my Year 1 and 2 class

A reflection of my journey - slideshow shows my progress this term as detailed in this blog post. Introduction to SRSD If you have been following any of my posts, you will know that my journey into evidence-based practice in all areas led me to SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) last year. I started to explore what I could find online and quickly realised that, even though I was only scratching the surface of what SRSD is, the impacts on my class's writing were obvious. I listened to numerous podcasts and read as much as I could find, discovering that SRSD truly fits the bill for an evidence-based approach to writing. I must preface this by saying that I am not an expert; my qualifications lie in my commitment to using best practices and making this work in a typical New Zealand classroom. Professional Learning Development (PLD) with ThinkSRSD As a staff, we collectively decided to undertake Professional Learning Development (PLD) in ThinkSRSD. Our goal is to develop a sh...

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally Linking Reading and Writing

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally linking Reading and Writing Why a Basic Organiser Struck a Chord Recently, I shared a very basic organiser for reading comprehension on my Facebook page—something I have used frequently in my classroom. I was genuinely surprised by how popular the post became. It’s clear there’s a real hunger among teachers for practical ways to foster writing independence in young learners. With that in mind, I wanted to share the reasoning behind this organiser and how it fits into the wider journey of developing independent writers. Laying the Foundations: Sentence-Level Understanding My class of six- and seven-year-olds are building solid foundations as writers. We’ve invested a lot of time working at the sentence level, using Colourful Semantics to help children understand how sentences are constructed. From there, we began to add greater detail using planners inspired by Colourful Semantics, linking this with th...

Puppets in my play-based class....why they work so well

I have been using puppets in my classroom for years now. It wasn't until I started using puppets with Number Agency that I actually started to stop and think about why they work so well. When children see the puppet villain their eyes light up, they are excited, engaged and interact very authentically with this imagined character. In fact if you hand one of the agents the puppet they can easily take on the character. I will often see quite shy children come alive with a puppet on their hand, or when they are talking to a puppet. Because of this high level of engagement I started to use puppets last year more widely to explore emotions and friendships. The results were amazing, children seemed to relate beautifully to the puppet and in a way the puppet could convey the message so much better than I could. When the puppets started to create short videos for the children to watch the learning really came alive. The Empathy family was able to guide us...

Number Agents

Search This Blog