1. Three Roads to Learning September 28, 2015

2.  My hope is that we can become better at diagnosing our students in Math class, and setting each on their own journey to becoming competent, risk-taking, independent learners with a strong skill set combined with number sense… with a confidence to believe that they are mathematicians!

3.  Today I want to highlight some of the resources that have been created/purchased in FLB to better support you.  Although time is tight, we will look at such resources as FLB Early Years Diagnostic Tool Level A and B, First Steps in Math, Numeracy Nets, Leaps and Bounds, MAPLE, Dreambox Learning, and the Grand daddy of them all, Van de Walle!

4.  10 Instructional Shifts:  Incorporate ongoing cummulative review into every day’s lesson.  Adapt what we know works in our ELA programs and apply it to math classrooms  Use multiple representations of mathematical entities  Create language-rich classroom routines  Take every available opportunity to support the development of number sense

5.  Build from graphs, charts and tables  Tie the math to such questions as “How big?” “How much?” “How far” to increase the natural use of measurement throughout the curriculum  Minimize what is no longer important  Embed the mathematics in realistic problems and real-world contexts  Make “Why?” “How do you know?” “Can you explain?” classroom mantras  From Accessible Mathematics, Steven Leinwand

6.  Assessment for learning!  We wouldn’t put a student into a reading passage if we didn’t have a pretty good idea of where their reading level was, right? In fact now with Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark assessments, those will direct your direction with your students in reading, so why not Math?  What diagnostics are available?

7.  This tool was created in-house  Level A—5,6 and 7 year olds  Level B—7,8, and 9 year olds  Both of these tools are very well done, although it is necessary to be one on one delivery and quite labor intensive and maybe wouldn’t use for the entire class  I will come in and deliver these to particular students for you though.

8.  These Diagnostic tasks are for each grade level. They provide the task, common misconceptions, alternate locations in publications for support, etc.  Very well laid out and very user friendly  Tracking tool/charts to track your students’ progress in all strands  We have a divisional set, as well many schools have.

9.  We would like all teachers to be trained in First Steps as initially this is Professional Development for teachers  This program gives teachers a solid understanding of big ideas, and where students are coming from and where they need to go  Further, it provides a number of diagnostic tasks across all phases of development

10.  This program was purchased for all schools. It comes as dvd’s—one student and one teacher resource  It is designed as an intervention for classroom teachers for those students up to 3 years delayed in math, thus if teaching grade 8, the 7/8 dvd would address students working at grade 5,6 and 7 levels  It is full of diagnostics and then provides a pathway for the student—one guided and the other more open ended.  Developed by Marian Small  Also links to common approved resources  Excellent tool that could be utilized for bigger groups or whole class in some cases  Each school (if applicable) has the 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8 copies as a student dvd and teacher dvd.

11.  Beyond the curriculum frameworks in Math, there are support documents in place now for all grade levels with the exception of grades 3 and 4…still to come!  MAPLE-if you have not already signed up for a MAPLE account, it would be worthwhile for all subject areas to do so.  www.mapleforem.ca www.mapleforem.ca

12.  Some of you are on the FLB Numeracy Committee, but for those unfamiliar, we do have some plans in place. ◦ Tracking basic fact for each student—K-8 ◦ Oral mental math time built into every day ◦ Divisional Assessments in mental math ◦ Problem solving framework—groups, discourse, 3 part problem solving etc. with a problem solving assessment ◦

13.  Hands on Problem Solving—Grade 1-8 in every building  Math Expressions—Developing Student Thinking and Problem Solving through Communication—in every building  Both of these resources encourage us to go beyond the traditional single answer problem

14.  I still believe this is the best resource there is on the market. It is written in very user friendly terms, sees math as developmental and touches on all areas: basic facts, all of the strands, mental math, problem solving etc.

15.  All of our K-8 schools are participating in this pilot. Dreambox is an online resource that we are piloting in FLB in which students from K-8 will be using daily.  This program is the only approved Mb. Online resource. It is developed by Kathy Fosnot of the Fosnot Institute and provokes conceptual understanding for our students—NOT an online math fact support.  If you are not part of the pilot, please try and watch students in your building working on it.

16.  I hope if you were unfamiliar with any of these resources that you take some time now and look them up in your building  This powerpoint will be on my wiki—  www.curriculuminstructionassessment.wikispaces.c om www.curriculuminstructionassessment.wikispaces.c om  as will it is linked from the FLB web page  If you would like some supports, please contact me, or Brad Hayward the Numeracy coach, and we would be more than happy to work with you on your journey!