Maths

MATHS NORMS

Throughout the year we will endeavour to unpack the Positive Classroom Norms, also known as the Maths Norms. Last issue we shared what the norms were. Today, we unpacked the Maths Norm - Making mistakes is valuable.

This norm is an important way to increase our understanding beyond just getting the answer right. Dr Jo Boaler, author and mathematics professor states,” Research shows that when students make mistakes, synapses fire and brains grow. Brain activity is particularly strong in individuals with a growth mindset. It is good to make mistakes.”

Some students shared their understandings of what this norm meant to them:

• They can help you find a different strategy
• You can discover new things
• You can improve and do better
• Helps your brain grow
• You can create something new out of mistakes
• You can think back and reflect
• Mistakes can provide knowledge
• Mistakes want to make you keep on going
• They can help you focus

Our focus in Maths

Over the past few weeks we have been unpacking and investigating how we can represent numbers to 10,000. With each challenge we have focussed on how we can best identify place value of digits within three and four digit numbers.

Building on our prior knowledge we have developed in previous grades, we have continued to show how to represent and flexibly rename three-digit numbers as counts of hundreds, tens and ones. For example: 247 is 2 hundreds, 4 tens and 7 ones or, 2 hundreds and 47 ones, or 24 tens and 7 ones.

We used playing cards and MAB blocks to solidify strategies when helping us to read and write numbers beyond 1000, applying knowledge of the place value, and

partitions numbers by their place value into thousands, hundreds, tens and ones.

In addition to this we have looked at how to round numbers to the nearest ten, hundred and thousand. We will continue to delve deeper into this once we introduce decimals next week.