Number Agents

Welcome back from head agent.

I have been giving a lot of thought to this concept lately. Throughout our professional inquiries one thing comes through clearly, our learners that struggle in those core areas of literacy and numeracy all lack confidence in their own abilities.  Because of this they are unwilling to take risks and often believe they 'can't' before they even try.  They are inclined to sit back and let others do the work and take the risks, they are the children we struggle to help to make the progress that we know they are capable of. Obviously there are other things going on, but this self-confidence comes through clearly as a barrier. After thinking about these children and this lack of confidence I realised that for some, this lack of confidence only comes through in these areas of learning.   These children may appear to have quite good self-esteem otherwise and this lack of belief is only related to specific areas of learning.  Hence the term 'learning esteem.' This ma...

I have settled into a planning habit of simply mind mapping my term goals for learning.  I use the simplemind app for this, loved it so much I purchased the full version.  I love planning this way and it forms the bones of my term beautifully, it also fits with the way I think. A PDF of this can be found here, that may be able to be enlarged more easily.   From this I obviously set some more specific intentions in my weekly Number Agent Planning and a weekly plan.  These again are pretty basic and I don't like to go over the top and overthink as often the sessions go where the children take them.  My main overarching aim with Number Agents is number sense.  I believe that this needs to be developed deeply and in rich ways and simple is best :) What I love about play-based is that children are being monitored on an individual level, so although they work within the whole class group we have many opportunities to interact with them ...

Holidays give me a lot of time to think.  After my last post about disobedient thinking I have been reflecting further.  I am lucky enough to have an amazing best friend...she is an incredible teacher, and traveled the play-based path far earlier than I.  Unfortunately for her, she is not in the privileged position I am in, she is not lucky enough to be a teaching principal like I am, so has to make change in different ways than I am able to. I am incredibly aware that some of you work in situations where enacting change is difficult.  Very sadly you make not have any say in how things go at your school.  I have been thinking about what disobedience may look like for you.   I have experienced being in this position.  I found my first year teaching to be the hardest year of my life, I considered leaving I was constricted and confined to teaching a way that was not necessarily me and often felt bullied  It wasn't that I didn't have amazing c...

By now, many of you that read my blog will be familiar with this book.  I have to say that reading this book was a lightbulb turning on for me.  I could relate completely. Number Agents was born out of this type of thinking.  I hated the way maths was being taught...I found it to be such a stand alone subject, which shouldn't really be the case if it is delivered well.  I was a numeracy project robot, blindly believing that this was the way I should teach math to my little people.  But I also had my own background of hating math, feeling stupid, hating pressure, suffering math anxiety (to this day) to draw upon.  I just couldn't marry up what I knew about math anxiety and the way I was teaching math.  I was lucky enough to attend a fabulous course based on Mantle of the Expert, and following this Number Agents was born.  It was my way of apply my own disobedient thinking to turn something I wasn't entirely happy with into something I ...

I recently found this fabulous little video... my children loved it and we talked about the sparkle being our imagination, which they could relate to. I love how they add a drawing each time and use it to tell the story, it is a fantastic little video to teach children about the storytelling process. It got me thinking about how to extend on picture use, and combine this with storytelling to help children to see how they can start giving their stories a beginning, middle and end.  I always focus in on using the picture, and tell a lot of stories out loud, but have never connected these two together explicitly for children.  We usually focus on just drawing the one picture to help us to tell our story. We watched the video together a couple of times. I then modelled how this could be done, by drawing one picture at a time and telling the story as I went.  First I drew a princess "once upon a time there lived a beautiful princess."  I then drew a v...

This post follows on from my last one and put very simply is a list of ten reasons I think National Standards need to go. As I said in my last blog post I believe our education system, across all sectors is under stress and in major need of an honest reshuffle.  One of the reasons for this stress is our testing culture, one that has crept up on us over time, but one now that pervades every crevice of our classrooms.  This testing culture has been amplified with the introduction of National Standards and I believe doing away with these unstandard standards would see a major reduction in stress almost straight away. So here they are, the ten reasons I think National Standards need to go... 1)They are not standard.  There is no way, without copious levels of moderation and time spent using tools like PACT that they could possibly be standard.  Time spent moderating to prove what we already know about children, is in my opinion, wasted time.  The simple re...

The announcement of the changes to or addition to the technology curriculum in terms of enhancing digital technology got me thinking...it has had me blogging in my head all weekend and so, here I sit, about to try to get that blog post out of my head, onto the screen.  Ironic in the fact that I am using digital technology in an attempt to challenge and transform thinking...very ironic indeed because I was not of the generation that grew up being taught through this digital technology...but miraculously can use it to suit my needs because I was engaged in a curriculum that taught me to develop other skills that in turn allowed me to apply this across all areas of my life, that allow me to see myself as a learner...and I didn't need to be taught through digital technologies to do that, I needed to talk to and interact with human beings in challenging situations that engaged and interested me.  But, i'm getting distracted from my point and the title of my post...so let me get bac...