'Show Me' Your Strategy!

Today all my groups learned how to use an ipad app called 'Show Me' This app is an interactive whiteboard that allows the students to record their strategies while they explain them. We will be doing this regularly so that you are able to see what the students are learning and it also gives my students a fantastic opportunity to share their thinking and clarify their understanding through an interactive medium.

Group 1 (Year 5's) Group 3 (Year 8's) and Group 4 (Year 8's) are all learning to use Reversibility and Place Value Partitioning to answer addition or subtraction equations. They are working on their video's so keep checking back as they will be uploaded soon : )

Below is Sacred from Group 1 explaining how to use reversibility as a strategy for an addition equation.

  

The video below is of Group 2 (my year 2/3's) explaining today, how they solved an addition equation using Place Value. They are using materials (ice-block sticks) as they have just started on Place Value.

What are Equivalent Fractions?

My students have been learning how to identify fractions as well as add and subtract fractions with common denominators. However, now that they are pretty good at that we are starting to look at equivalent fractions and how we can use them to help us work out equations with differing denominators.

Watch the video below which demonstrates what equivalent fractions are : )

Place Value - What is it all about?

Welcome back to term 2!

My students have gotten straight back into learning all they can about mathematics. 

Today Group 1 and 2 started to look at Place Value. Place Value can be one of the trickier areas for children to understand so we started right at the beginning. I gave each group a task - to estimate the number of ice block sticks in the big pile in front of them. After they had all estimated we discussed which way would be the best and fastest way to count. Some said in two's or fives while others said ten. So they were then asked to bundle each stick in to groups of ten and tie it with a rubber band. This is developing the concept of trading. Children need to understand that when we have ten ones we need to change them into 1 ten (a bundle or group) and ten bundles of ten makes one hundred. Once we had created all our bundles of ten (and/or hundreds) we were able to count together in tens and work out who's estimation was closest to the number of sticks that were in the original pile.

After that we used the sticks and bundles (ones/tens) to form an equation. It was the student's job to work out how many were all together by separating the ones and tens when adding. The year 5's were also using hundreds. See below :)