This blog post follows on from my one of yesterday about literacy.
Understanding the Science of Learning and understanding neurodiversity remain as important for maths and all other areas of the curriculum as they are for literacy. In reality it is teacher knowledge and the way they can breathe this knowledge and 'flair' that make the difference.
While a 'programme' or 'approach' can help guide practice, teacher knowledge remains paramount, so just because it is so important I will reiterate, it is not time that matters, but the quality with which this teaching is done. In order to make this a reality, rather than just mandating a length of time we need to spend on maths and literacy, significant time, PLD and resourcing needs to come forth from our government, I await this with baited breath.
Not only this, significant support needs to be provided to teachers in classrooms to be able to enable them to assist ALL learners, the classrooms of today, look very different to how they looked even five years ago, and massively different from ten years ago. Sadly the resourcing being provided to assist our most vulnerable learners has stagnated, if not reduced over the years. It is hard to enact a a rich teaching environment, based on best practice, that meets the needs of ALL learners, when you are spending a significant amount of your day assisting children to regulate or meeting their health needs because they do not meet the mystical threshold for support.
Our system is not currently meeting the needs of our most vulnerable learners and something needs to be done about this right now!
Ok, a bit off track, but it needs to be said, in order to ensure ALL children make progress in literacy and maths, robust supports need to be in place that enable us to teach and connect.
Back on track, so what does an hour of mathematics look like in my largely Year 2 classroom. Firstly, mathematics and literacy are everywhere, but maths is just so easy to find. Maths is about patterns, relationships, connections and language. Finding this through play is easy, so if we are only talking about time, it could probably be said that children spend most of their day engaging in some sort of activity or thought that could be classified as mathematics. I could probably say the same about literacy, but this post is about how I am specifically and explicitly teaching maths over the day.
For those with my scope and sequence and for those that follow my number agent group, it is possibly really obvious how I do this. For the intent of this post, I will presume you don't follow that group. However I do encourage you to join this group on facebook, as I share a huge amount of my daily practice via this group.
It is important I note that if you have read my literacy post, you will note how this is seemingly broken up into small chunks. This is an approach that works well, I call it bite sized learning, I find it allows time to review, teach and practice, is just the right length of time for my little people and reduces that cognitive load as we are being really specific and I am deliberately targeting my teaching rather than allowing myself to go off track. This approach also works extremely well in my class that is based on a pedagogy of play and developmentally aware practice. I find as the year goes on, the time we can spend does increase, but initially I like to keep it to ten minutes (this does not count the time taken to get them ready for the task.). As we venture more into problem solving, sessions will be more like 20, however this session is broken up, so the time that I spend explicitly teaching would be less than ten minutes.
I should probably say something I neglected to say in my previous post. Like anyone I have children that find it difficult to sit with the class, or do exactly what we are doing at the time. I don't see this as 'mis-behaviour' I allow them to do what they need to do. If this means they continue playing near us, all good, if it means they sit on the couch and watch, all good, if it means they come for part of the time but them walk out of the class to reset, all good. I want to meet every child where they are right now and this means being guided by their cues.
So how does a normal day look - (Times for example only and not every day will include all of these things, there just is not time)
*Scope and sequence session - we will either break this into two parts, or one, dependent on the length of time needed to cover the session. I will also break one session into parts over the week or even two weeks if that is more important, to allow for review and practice. (Ten minutes per session) x 2 sessions
*Math talk - usually part of each session is some sort of visual image for math talk. This can take anything from ten -fifteen minutes, dependent on how much children share. There is a lot of peer to peer talk here and some talks include the use of materials. (Ten - 15 minutes per session)
*Math videos, songs and games - these are interspersed throughout the day, usually we will spend about five - ten minutes on one or all of these. (15 minutes interspersed over the day)
*Problem solving - we start problem solving with story based problems based on the children and their lives. These sessions initially are very teacher directed and explicit. Children do have material and will also draw ideas, but there is close teacher direction here initially until children have the foundations for greater independence. (Ten minutes)
*Portal Problem Solving - this starts when we are over halfway through the scope and sequence and replaces the problem solving mentioned above. You can find more out about this in my number agent group. It includes review, explicit teaching, scaffolding, independent problem solving, sharing and revisiting. (20 minutes)
*Finding math in our daily play, lots of sharing via our journal will include lots of mathematical thought.
***My release teacher focuses in on other strands during her Wednesdays and Fridays. The portal is used to deliver more strand based problems, while mine tend to focus on number.
What I am hoping to show with this post and my post prior to this one, is demonstrate just how much literacy and maths already happens in a classroom. As I said in my previous post, our days a fluid, I do not have a timetable, we write down our must do, want to do and could do in our scrapbook. We simply them tick off items done and write down the things not done for the next day. Just like any classroom, every day is different and often if I have spent only a little time on maths the day before, I will make sure I spend more the next day. This all evens up over the week.
What is important to me, is not only that children are receiving quality explicit teaching, but that they have ample time to develop social, emotional skills, to make friends, to play, to develop and share their interests and pursue their own passions, as with literacy, children will often link their play to what we have been learning and keep exploring these ideas.
When it comes down to it, time is irrelevant, as my Std 4 teacher told me, quality over quantity (this was in relation to writing, and as you can see, it is a message I still struggle with.)
What we need is a system that resources us, supports us and provides us with the means to ensure that this quality is happening in every classroom. As I said before, I await with baited breath.
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