Maths PD with Jo Knox

This year our School wide inquiry has been around Maths. Throughout the year we have really good informative PD sessions with Jo Knox. I have especially found the Team 2 sessions with Jo helpful. Some fresh ideas for working with groups or whole class. Seeing Jo in action with some of the student has been great. 

Digital Fluency Intensive

Really disappointed today the exam was a challenge. Need to spend some time in the holidays to go over the parts of the exams that I need to work on. Not really much to say. 

Thanks to Dorothy, Matt and Gerhard for their support this term, lovely to meet more

teachers in the Maiakalani Cluster. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 8

Week 8 and our last week of Learn, Create, Share with our amazing support Dorothy, Matt, Gerhard and today, James. Thank you so much for sharing your passion with the 2017 Term 3  Digital Fluency Intensive Group. What a term this has been, high points during the term for me were getting to Learn, Create and Share with other Manaiakalani teachers it has been a pleasure spending Friday's with you all. 

This Friday we spent time working in New Site. We all created a new site which we have linked our Class Blogs, Class Sites and Professional Blogs which will be a good way to keep in touch with each other. I also linked our Multimodal Brainstorm activity for the story of the Lion and the Mouse. Google New Site was so much easier to work with then Google Create a site, so thankful I got this opportunity to get support  and a whole day to play and work on this.  Below is a screen shot of my learning, and a lot of creating and the end result with a link to this site.                                                                                                                        

In week 9 we will all sit a 3 hour exam for our Level 1 Google Education Badge. Good Luck everyone.

https://sites.google.com/ptengland.school.nz/joce/home

Digital Fluency Intensive.

Week 7
Today we looked at making our site page visible and engaging for learners. 
When looking at my own site I wondered what my learners thought about it because they are the ones that will use this site everyday.
In our discussions I found out that the students thought it was too busy and there were buttons that had no links, they wanted something new and different. Below is the learning site page.

I took into account all the things my learners discussed and made changes. So far I have my WALT, all the books for the week in it's own box,  word work is in it's own box and activities in the other. The box to the right is something different  and new the students have not seen this, they are Ready to Read audio books. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 6

Week 6: In DFI last week Dorothy talked about the importance of Visible teaching and learning. I have since looked at my learning site page I made at the beginning of the year for my learners. Having a year 2 class is great, the potential to make our learning site page more visible is endless and I look forward to being a part of creating a new Team 2 collaborative learning site page for our new SHARED LEARNING SPACE next year. 

We looked at building our very own Professional Standards for the Teaching Profession site using tables and HTML. I really enjoyed this because we split into 3 small groups and got time to work at our own pace and really focus and understand the technical side of site building. Thanks Gerhard for assisting us in setting up our Professional Standards site page. 

Below is a snapshot of my Professional Teaching and Our Code Our Standards.

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 5

Making a New Google Site Page

Today I learned to created my own Google Site for a text called 'Lion and the Mouse'. I collaborated with a group of junior school teachers and together we used Multimodal a good model to represent the joint representations we searched such as audio, youtube clips, wikipedia, and images for a literacy unit on values. The screen shot below is my site page for our literacy unit. My site has audio of sounds lions and mice make. An activity made in Explain everything app on an ipad. Some creative writing prompts and recount writing opportunities. It was really good to see how sites are created. I could spend a lot of time being creative with a site. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 4 Screencastify

Screencastify is an app which you can record yourself while moving in and out screens.
I learned how to Screencastify today.  Below is a short video of how to leave positive comments.The focus of this video is to explain how to leave positive blog comments. Always greet the author and read their post thoroughly and comment on something you thought was interesting and caught your eye when you read it. My learners don't always read the post properly before they comment so this is an area that I will work on this term.  
I just listened to my recording and realised I kept saying blogging when I really should be saying 'keep posting'.  

  Thanks to Fiona, Kashmira and Gerhard

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 4 Using Explain Everything

Fiona and Kashmira joined us today and we had a really good session on Explain Everything. I looked at Kashmira's EE on Positioning and I thought it was very well done. The EE had opportunities for students to learn how to duplicate images, cut and paste images. Most importantly it teaches the learners the common direction of left & right, up & down, under & on top, a really good EE. I must remember to look in Team 1s folder. I'm sure there will be activities for my target group.

Working with Jo knox. This is our groups continuous and discrete 
questions for part-to-whole and whole-to-part.

Hexagons working with Jo Knox

This group did some amazing Maths with Jo Knox this week. Team 2 had PD with Jo Knox as part of our inquiry into Teaching. our team focus was Fractions Jo worked with my top Maths group.

Fractions on a number line was the learning focus. The students did really.

Hangout

I had a very quick Hangout conversation with Dorothy this afternoon before my team meeting. This is a screen shot of this afternoons Hangout. Thanks everyone. 

Hangout Conversation

 Last Friday in DFI we looked at  our Gmail. I've cleaned up my Gmail and it's looking a lot more tidy and  organised with a lovely background image. 

 Matt showed us the undo tab in Gmail and how you can send an email to anyone and if for any reason you may have forgotten to add more to the email or want to undo an email then you just click on the undo tab but , you have a choice of 10, 20, or 30 seconds to undo. So we got to play around with the undo tab. I sent Matt an email but I couldn't find the undo button quick enough and the email sent  (oh no). An apology email soon followed.
 I invited Matt and Dorothy to a Hangout conversation on Monday and for a laugh I wore a wig. This is a screen shot of our Hangout.

Hyper Studio

We have been working in Hyper Studio with Mrs Lagitupu . She has been very patient in showing us how to copy and paste and also duplicate parts of our pictures to add to other slides in our stack. We created a PENN movie about friendships using our Hyper Studio creations. Below is our movie.

Inquiry into Maths

Fractions
We have been working on Fraction for the last 4 weeks and today we are using our knowledge of fractions and icing biscuits in different colours. We iced1/2s and 1/4s of our biscuits. It was a really nice way to end fractions and we will revisit this area of maths later in the term. 

Time

This weekend I made a form in Google forms about how much my students know about Time. The form is multi choice answers and I made the questions easy to read for Year 2s. Lots of Modelling will have to be done first. Maybe because it's our first form we will do this one together. I wanted a banner that showed Time but  the range of banners in Google forms didn't have what I wanted so, with all that I have learned in DFI I figured out how to get what I wanted. 
I opened a Google doc, opened the the explore tab on the bottom right hand corner typed TIME Banners into the search space and then images I  scrolled through the free images. I found the image and inserted that into the Google doc. Took a screenshot saved it to my desktop, went back to the Google form I had made clicked the colour palette tab and clicked the image tab. Clicked upload photo, cropped the image and clicked select, wait for a couple of seconds and your image will appear as a new banner on your form. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 3

Another amazing day with the DFI group. We focused on the functions in our gmail. I was able to change the theme of my Gmail page , and looking at what the functions do in setting. I'm going to clean up all my contacts this weekend. Google Hangout is great we got to hangout with each other and Dorothy who is in Australia this week. We had a group Hang out where we had to discuss a students post and recorded our discussion to post on our blog. The video below is a Hang Out discussion I had with Kiriwai and Kelsey. The post is of a class at Ruapotaka School and their flying creations. Well done team.

I have invited Matt and Dorothy to Hang out with me next week. I also have a Hang out invitation from Miss Lavakula on Monday. So this will be really good practice. 
Thanks Matt and Gerhard for todays session and thanks Kelsey for helping us out today.

Making a form in Google Forms.

I really thought I would struggle on my course on Fridays but I'm really surprised how well things are coming together nicely in DF Intensive group. I just need to make time to practice so I don't forget what I have learned.
This week I learned how to generate a form in Google Forms. 
Making sure my instructions are clear for the person responding. I can add a videos or images and make it look good. We all made our forms about different topic such as food, sport and hobbies and then we filled out each others forms. It was fun.  I'd like to generate a form around our Inquiry about the Moon, Earth and Sun to find out how much my students know. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 2

I learned to add our Google Map of holiday destinations from our DFI group that meet on Fridays.

Digital fluency Intensive

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive Term 3 2017

Immersion Movie

This morning we were entertained by our very amazing talented teachers here at Pt England School. There was music, singing, dancing, teachers in space and our hall transformed into a sky full of stars it felt like being in space. 

This is Team 2s Immersion Movie.

Room 26 End Of Term Inquiry

Inquiry Term 2 2017

Room 26 and I have enjoyed this terms inquiry. Our inquiry question was 'How do we make a kite that flies? This was not easy for us because there were a number of problems we encountered. Such as to much rain, too much wind, materials were not strong enough and things broke easily. We made paper jet planes pinwheels and our own kites and we came to the conclusion that all the things we wanted to fly needed wind, speed, balance, lift and air. On one fine day we decided to take the $2 shop kites out and they flew well.  I visited Takaparawhau (Bastion Point) for the annual Matariki Kite Day there were some amazing kites.  This is a short film of what we got up to.  

PENN Movie Term 2 2017

Writing activity

 

Incredible Years Programme

I have been attending an Incredible Years Programme and in this session we discussed proactive tools that we can use  for managing misbehaviour. We talked about drawing our own tool box and working out which tool best fits the words or action we might use in our classroom to redirect or manage misbehaviours. 

This is my tool box.

Inquiry End of Term 2

3D Shapes

WALT: identify 3D shapes and try to draw them.

 

 

 

 

Similes

An activity I have made and shared in our school wide doc.

WALT: compare two different things in an interesting way.

By using similes we can make our writing more interesting for the reader.

 

Our First PENN Movie

This is the first of our PENN Movies this year. 

Professional Inquiry.

This year I have a class of bright beautiful energetic year 2s. We started the week getting to know each other, the class routines, and 'The Pt England Way'.  So much has happened in the last 4 weeks. Swimming, Kiwis Sports, Creative space, Maker space, team assemblies, the opening of our new bike track and to top it all off a leaky room, which meant relocating to another room. I was devastated I had spent a lot of time getting room 26 ready for the new students. After a whole day I managed to turn our new class into an amazing learning space for my students and I. I have to mention my students were amazing and concerned about how I was feeling, they  kept asking me if I was ok even during a swim lesson a student swam over to where I was sitting to ask if I was ok 

"It's ok Ms Tumahai we will help you clean"    Bless.

So now that we have settle I have been able to put some thought into my Professional Inquiry and this years inquiry focus is Maths. I have to say this area is making me a little nervous. I never understood maths as a child and so I didn't enjoy maths at all. But I have an obligation to give my students every opportunity to learn maths and enjoy it. Which brings me to a group of students who I have identified as the "Stuck Stage 2s"

So my inquiry is: 

Back to school

  
  Why is it that every year we all return to school after the holidays and summer decides it wants to make an appearance, What's up with the weather? I'm not sure about others but summer in my neck of the woods was blowing a gale. More windy days then the hot relaxed days of summer. 
  I began thinking about the village and the sweltering hot and stuffy rooms that make it very uncomfortable for me and the students to stay focused in the hot afternoons .However the students returned, some ready, some not so sure, and some still taking time to settle into the routines of school and the classrooms are hot.

Inquiry Term 1 2017

Kaitīakitanga i nga wā katoa

My Class for 2017

I get to spend 2017 with this lovely group of students. There are some that I taught in the NewEntrant class and some who are the siblings of the students I taught in 2016.  I am excited and can't wait to take this journey with Room 26 2017.