Developing Mathematical Inquiry Community [DMIC]- Staff meeting/PD

Resources
NZ maths link - really good video here.
DMIC website

Shift our mindset out of Numeracy Project and stages. Stop blaming the kids for bad data.

Why do we need to do this?
At the end of year 8, 26% of Maori and 11% of Pasifika are achieving the curriculum standard.

If I've taught them I did my bit. But did they actually learn it?

Communication and Participation Framework: Teacher actions to engage students in mathematical practices

Mana Enhancement

This afternoon I went to a meeting about Mana Enhancement, part of the Mauri-Ora programme at TPS. Three of my male Maori students are involved, hence my participation. Myself and the other teachers who have students participating went along to learn what it was all about, so we could better understand, support and help our students who will be doing the same things over the next 10(ish) weeks.

I had no idea what to expect because my students were not involved last year (only year 5's upwards are involved).

It. was. awesome.

Jake, who was running the programme with us (and the kids) took us through what the kids would be doing, but in an hour instead of over 10 weeks. Super quick, but just a taster so we could understand what they would be doing.

We watched this video -

We talked about the Mana Enhancement model which is a tool designed to help students understand what they are feeling, why they are feeling that way and what they can do to help themselves feel better. It uses Maori terminology to link to feelings of strength and bravery. 

Jake is going to go through this model with each of the Maui Ora students to help them understand and process their feelings better.

Celebrating Eid!

There is only one child in my class who is not Maori/Pasifika - he is Afghani. 

This is him.

As the only kid who isn't Maori/Pasifika, sometimes he misses out a bit.. 

As a school we have week long celebrations for Maori language week, Tongan language week, Cook Island language week, Samoan language week (etc), but there is no Afghani language week... 

So everybody else got a celebration of their culture, and he, and his little brothers, didn't. 

So in Room 6, we made our own celebration! 

Today was Eid, a Muslim celebration which marks the end of Ramadan. It is celebrated by visiting and spending time with family and friends, sharing a feast together, buying and wearing fine new clothes and giving gifts to others. We made the whole day about Eid. 

The boy, Mojtaba, was delighted. Archana and I had told him beforehand that we were doing something special for Eid, and he was bubbling with excitement when he turned up to school this morning! 

To begin our day, I discussed with the class how we celebrated everyones culture through the various language weeks (and more!), but that one culture from our class didn't have a language week, and thats not fair that we didn't celebrate theirs! The kids all nodded in agreement. They understood. Even though they know nothing about Afghanistan and Muslim holidays, they understood that Mojtaba's culture was just as important as theirs and that we should celebrate it all the same. These are some pretty empathetic 8 year olds, tell you what. 

We had several aspects to our day 

-We learnt a song that explains how Eid is celebrated

-We learnt how to say 'Eid Mubarak' and greet people properly

-Decorated cookies that we could then give to people

-Made cards to wish people a happy Eid day

-Ate Sheer Pudding

The rest of the class were so keen to try out the new Afghani food, with some then practising how to be polite about not liking it (haha!). They loved the idea of giving a card and cookie to somebody to wish them Eid Mubarak! The boys even spent the day looking after Mojtaba's two younger brothers who came to celebrate with us.

It was a great day all around. I was so proud of the kids and how enthusiastic they were to learn about the Afghani culture and gives things a go!

Digital Immersion/Annual Hui (Term 3, Week 5)

Today the MDTA's were invited to the Manaiakalani Annual Hui, held at the Panmure Yacht & Boating Club. It was a great day, with lots of different speakers having their bit, all coming together to share the message of the work Manaiakalani has done over the past year. 

First up were the student ambassadors from each of the 12 schools. They each shared part of their learning which demonstrated use of digital affordance, the learn create share pedagogy, amazing teacher creativity or student creativity with their blogs. 

Next up were the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers, sponsored by the SPARK Foundation. They each shared about the research they have been conducting this year. I created this sketch-note to help myself remember key things that different people presented that I thought were awesome/inspirational;/thought-provoking. 

After morning tea was the team from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre presenting data collected from the 12 Manaiakalani schools and introducing the next set of ideas and goals to work on. Again, I created a sketch-note to record my thought process while they talked.

After this, Russell Burt, prinicipal of Point England School, put things very simply. We know how to move the 'bottom' students to the 'middle', and only some of us are doing that, and now the team from Woolf Fisher had just told us how to get the 'middle' students to the 'top'. Russell's message - JUST DO IT! It is for the benefit of your students. You as a teacher choosing not to do the things we know will work because you don't like them, agree with them, whatever, is to the detriment of your students, so get over it, and do it for your kids.

After lunch, Dorothy talked the crowd through the Manaiakalani Outreach clusters. These are groups of schools around the country which want 'our recipe' for success with low decile low achieving students. Although it is not that simple, these outreach clusters are now on a fast-tracked 3 year programme modelled from the Tamaki cluster so they can accelerate their students as well. 

I created another sketch-note the record snippets of the discussion as it went along.

Overall, it was an awesome day at the annual hui. I learnt a lot about Manaiakalani (when I thought I knew everything... ha!) and definitely got some food for thought to reflect on for my own practice. 

Kia kaha Manaiakalani!

Culturally responsive pedagogies (pt 4)

As part of our culturally responsive classroom, we tried to celebrate every language week that came along, including learning a song or dance from that culture which we could preform at assembly to share our learning with the school. Here are what we learnt!

For Samoan Language week

For Maori Language week in May

Some of our girls preforming a traditional Tongan dance at a staff members farewell assembly.

We will also learnt something for Tongan language week. As we have a student who is from Afghanistan, but there is no Afghani language week, at some point in time we will learn something from his culture as well so he feels included.

Culturally responsive pedagogies (pt 3)

Another aspect of our targeted cultural teaching was in writing. Everyday, the students would 'record a bit of their life'. In this book, they could free write, sometimes about a given topic or often they were just asked to write about themselves in whatever way they chose. Sometimes students wrote poems, sometimes they just narratives but mostly recounts (e.g. on the weekend I...).

Although this might seem pointless to some of them, it was our way of trying to empower the students to see that whatever they experience in their own lives matters and has valued - and that they can be an author too!

Kordell - my birthday

It was Kordell's birthday.

How old are you going to be? 9! and I can't wait.

My nan made a cake for me and everyone and cookies for all of us. I like the cake the most.

I played tag and hide and go seek and I had fun.

I have heaps of dogs and their names are Luce and Louis and Russell and Carol and Lola and Poppet. We had a pinata. I whacked a pinata and out came chocolate.

Hope T - at my aunts house

Hope T - At my aunts house

At my auntys house i went to the movies we watched was stuart little 2 with the mum Dub the little boy and the mouse when my aunty watched it she  side that movie was funny because  when the mouse turns into a cat and the cat turns into a mouse and the food that they ate was yum because! Then we went to eat and we ate mcDonalds then we went to the zoo. It was cool we saw a boy with a super hero costume.  We took for long  and my papa was waiting for me to go home.

I got tired and it was fun.

Hiria - at morning tea

Hiria - At morning tea

At morning tea me and my best friend hope.t we were playing tag it was great we were having fun playing tag it was amazing then she tag me then  i had   to run after her around the big play ground i go very tired then we had a long break to rest after we got back to our favourite game it was got super good. Then the bell rang after me and hope.t rushed to class fast!

When we asked the students to write about something specific, for example, an item that is important in their culture, they produced insightful work that showed they were making connections between their own lives and what we were reading/writing/discussing.

This was another way we tried to incorporate the students cultures and personal experiences into our learning everyday. We tried to make sure students understood that their culture mattered, was important, and was relevant to their everyday learning. Connections!

Culturally responsive pedagogies (pt 2)

Continuing with our cultural theme, we read other books as a class such as Selafina, and Tane steals the show, Papa's jandals and Saia and his turtle (among others). We focused for one week on each of these, dissecting them, getting fluent reading them and learning new words and about new cultures.

For guided reading, we also used stories that were based around the students cultures - Samoan, Tongan, New Zealand Maori, Niuean, etc. These can be seen in our planning here. For all of these stories, we used an audio-file as a follow up activity. This was so the students could hear the words being pronounced correctly, as well as reading them, so they got twice as much exposure to the other language.

These are some of the stories/poems we read
The Sons of Ma'afu story - Audio File
Kuri - Audio File
Poi story - Audio File
Awarua the Taniwha - Audio File
Mara (poem) - Audio File 
Te marama

In all of these, students were asked to make a personal connection to the story.  I remember one student, whilst reading the story Poi, told the group how she had made poi's with her aunty for Kapa Haka at her cousins school last year. What a rich connection! That student was then able to relate to the break-down of how to make the poi, the idea and experience of Kapa Haka and the family ties that associate with it.

We tried our best to record our discussions on our modelling books.

Finding meanings for new words in the story (This is from Kuri)

Recording questions we talked about from the story Poi.

Recording our predictions for the story Poi, based on the title and the picture on the first page.

Reading texts and discussing them in-depth provided rich conversation and allowed students to share their experiences in a safe and comfortable way. 

Culturally Responsive Pedagogies (pt1 )

One major focus for my class this term has been a cultural focus.

We have read a lot of culture based books, with a learning focus on making connection with what we read, and making predictions based on titles and cover pages. 

The first story we read together was the story Watercress Tuna and the children of Champion Street, written by Patricia Grace, a very famous New Zealand author. We read the story with the students, and one of the follow ups was to listen to the Youtube clip.

Then, we used the Maori, Samoan (etc) words from the audio file, and changed them as we read the English-only physical book. This cemented our knowledge and understanding of the words from other cultures. As we read the English-only version, I would leave blank spaces while reading and the students would say the Maori/Samoan word aloud to fill in the gap e.g. I would leave out 'dance' and they would say 'kanikani'. 

Then, each student wrote their own 'page' from the book - using a cultural item from their own culture. Here is one students' writing - 

Then we made our 'pages' into real pages, and hung them up around the classroom.

Some of the students even bought in their culture item, the one the magical tuna 'gave' them, and I was able to take some photos of them so their 'page' in our class book became even more realistic!

This was a great way to kick off Term 2, and get the kids hooked into reading and writing about their own cultures!