Leading Teacher Update

Meet our new Numeracy Learning Specialists

Last week our Numeracy Learning Specialist, Sophie Ratcliffe, started family leave and will be away until the end of the year. In her absence, Emilia McDonald (Year 4), Lauren Withers (Year 5) and Daniel Arnavas (Year 6) will be taking on the role of Acting Maths Leaders. 

Emilia, Lauren and Daniel are members of the Numeracy School Improvement Team (SIT) and have been working closely with Sophie as well as two Numeracy consultants, Jane Hubbard and Hannah Marino, from the the Mathematical Association of Victoria to implement the school priorities across Numeracy. They will continue this work for the remainder of the year.

Numeracy – School Improvement Team Update 

Since the beginning of the year, the Numeracy SIT have been planning for the implementation of our first whole school maths moderation. The purpose of whole school moderation is to support classroom teachers to further expand their understanding of student learning growth, and develop consistent practices for assessment. 

This term, classroom teachers will ask their students to complete a task that has been developed and trialled by the Numeracy SIT. Teachers will then meet in year level teams to mark these work samples and compare judgements using an agreed assessment checklist. Later, they will meet with teachers from different year levels to further compare their assessments so as to reach a judgement that is consistent with those of other teachers across the school. 

Numeracy Consultant 

Foundation students had a special visitor teaching maths in their classrooms. Hannah Marino from the Mathematical Association of Victoria modelled a maths lesson about the Structure of Number using the Launch, Explore, Summarise teaching model. This model aims to build student reasoning, understanding and fluency as they investigate and solve problems with increasing complexity.

The problem our Foundation students solved with Hannah last week was: 

I saw 10 flies on my bedroom wall, and I knew how many there were straight away without counting them. Can you draw what the 10 flies on the wall might have looked like? Now draw them a different way. Which picture do you think makes it easier to know there were 10 flies on my wall?

During these lessons the Foundation teachers had the opportunity to observe Hannah, and afterwards ask questions about the strategies used to support and extend students throughout the lesson. We look forward to having Hannah back later this term to model two more lessons for the Foundation team as well as present at our curriculum day.

What else has been happening in Numeracy? 

• The Year 1 students have been using number lines to count up. ~ Eska, 1A
• We learnt to use the ‘turn around’ strategy to solve addition problems. ~ Nora, 2C 
• In Year 3 we are making graphs using the information we have from surveys. ~ Louis, 3D
• The Year 4 students have been learning to solve vertical addition problems and check their answers. ~ Isabelle, 4A 
• Year 5 students learnt to plot coordinates on a cartesian plane. ~ Rosie, 5B 
• Year 6 students have been practising solving worded problems using vertical multiplication. ~ Cameron, 6B 

~ Sophie Ratcliffe, Numeracy Learning Specialist