Meet The Teacher

Meet the Teacher – Beth

A real reward of being an educator is witnessing the growth in students throughout the year. This is evident across all levels of the school, but more so noticeable in the Prep classes – especially in the first days, and weeks of school. This week I was lucky to be invited into Prep BF to join Beth and her fantastic students on their first full Wednesday at school.

After completing four-day weeks to allow the teachers to work 1 on 1 with students and complete essential start of school English and Maths assessments which will be used to guide our teaching practice through the rest of the year. The preps are now ready to start full weeks.

As I entered the room, students were already busy at work developing their ability to subitise. Subitising is the ability to identify the number of objects in a set without counting and when there is no special arrangement. Subitising is an essential pre-requisite for establishing 'part-part-whole' number knowledge for the numbers 1 to 10. That is, that 7 can be understood or recognised in terms of 5 and 2, 1 more than 6, 3 and 4, 1 less than 8, 3 less than 10 and so on.

Beth expertly ensured all students were engaged by giving everyone a number fan allowing all students to contribute their answer to the question and have their voices heard. This method also allows Beth to quickly scan the room to identify students who have mastered the concept and others who might need some further support. This subitise the dots activity perfectly “hooked” the students into their learning.

Students were then introduced to today’s WALT (We are Learning To…) find ways to make 10.

A goal within primary mathematics is for students to use partitioning strategies when operating on numbers. By building images and knowledge of these combinations at an early age, the ability to naturally partition larger numbers will be strengthened. Students should have many opportunities to combine and separate numbers to ten and come to clearly see and understand how these ‘basic facts’ are fundamental building blocks of our number system. Ultimately, they should be able to readily apply this knowledge in solving problems that involve partitioning and combining larger numbers and sets.

As students moved into the application phase of the lesson, they were asked to problem-solve using the OOPS Problem Solving Toolkit- for this lesson, Gwenny Guess and Charlie Check were identified as the characters who could help them with their work. Students had to cut out their ladybird and place dots on each wing to represent the different combinations to make 10. It was at this stage you could see Beth’s ability to care for a build resilience in her students, when a student lost one of their wings, Beth used this as an opportunity to scaffold some thinking with her student “If your ladybird only had one wing how many dots would it need?” rather than seeing this as a problem, and rescuing the student, Beth used this as an opportunity scaffold further thinking.

The other aspect of the lesson, which is so important for our younger students is getting students using scissors and glue sticks. Learning to cut with scissors helps to build hand strength, develop hand-eye coordination, improve bilateral coordination, a nd improve attention to tasks. Additionally, while using scissors the child is improving visual motor and visual perceptual skills.

As the lesson drew to its conclusion Beth gathered the students one more time to share their thinking, using an abacus and Charlie Check, she was able to add another visual representation for students, to further their understanding. The voice part of a lesson is a key part, where students can share their understanding, learn from their peers, and explain their thinking, whilst allowing Beth to check in with everyone and identify the next step in learning for each student.

I thank Beth and the students of PBF for inviting me into the classroom and look forward to seeing the growth they all make across 2024 and beyond.

Craig Gooding

Learning Specialist.