Group+communication



Sharon Edwards Robyn Unwin Michelle Usher

Wednesday 29th February 2012 During the lecture we decided on our group: Members are Michelle Usher, Sharon Edwards, Elin Stower, Robyn Unwin. We have yet to decide on a sub-strand that we will focus on. Michelle has volunteered to create the wiki space. Thanks Michelle, I have not had any experience with Wikis so that would be great. Awesome Michelle, thanks for that. I have found some math's pictures for the home page to make it a bit more interesting. Looking forward to working with you all ladies.

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Unfortunately Robyn and Sharon were unable to make it to the lecture today, so Elin and I discussed the best way to tackle this assignment. We decided that we would like to analyse the Number and Place Value Sub-strand and would get feedback from Sharon and Robyn if this is acceptable to them. We also decided that we would break the assignment into parts and each group member would analyse a different part. We will email these parts to all group members. Sorry I was unable to make it, car was not finished at the mechanics, even though he promised it would be. Typical. Look forward to your email Michelle. Sorry too ladies, I also had car troubles. Maybe we could meet on Wednesday to make sure were all clear on what is expected?

Wednesday 14th March 2012 We were informed tonight that one of our group members has had to drop this course so we are having a group meeting to discuss restructuring our original plan to tackle this assessment. So during the group meeting it was decided that we would each select three year levels and analyse the PK and DK within those year levels and outline the progression ready to marry our year levels into those of the other group members. We will each look at challenges within the year levels and responses to these challenges. Each member will also give some thought to the construction of a graphic organiser to represent this information in a reader friendly format. Not much work on maths so far sorry, concentrating more on Teaching Reading at the moment, will keep dipping into it what I can. I met with Elin today at our meeting and was told she was no longer taking Numeracy, unfortunately Michelle and Robyn were unable to come early and so didn't find out until the lecture. We now have to basically reorganise our roles to cover the areas Elin was assigned to.

Monday 19th March 2012 On the weekend I injured my hand, I have spent most of today at the doctor having it x-rayed and examined, I have applied for an extension for this assessment and will keep you informed of the outcome. Hope your hand is ok Michelle

Tuesday 20th March 2012 The course coordinator has very swiftly responded to my request and granted an extension of 7 days for this assessment.

Wednesday 21st of March 2012 My role is to look at years 3,4 and 5 to analyse the DK and PK for the number and place value strand. Have been sifting through the Australian Curriculum, slowly but surely, there is a lot of content for a teacher to get through in one year, and I am not even half way through yet. Our group is meeting at Uni today for an hour before the Maths lecture begins. Hope your hand is not too bad Michelle, will see you later. How are you going with year 6,7,8? Met at Uni today to go through some issues that we were having with clarifying exactly what we needed to do for the assessment. We discussed our thoughts on how we interpreted the task and after our meeting spoke to Judy who confirmed we were on the right track. Our meeting today was quite productive even though we did not physically get anything done on the assessment. I feel that we are all now on the same page with out understanding of what needs to be done to complete this assessment task. I agree Sharon, I feel that we are on the right track, now we just have to figure out how we are going to represent the information and our thoughts on this wiki.

Wednesday 27th March 2012 I've been re-reading the course coordinator's responses to questions, trying to make sure I am on the right track. I am thinking that we need to go deeper into the PK and DK of content descriptors rather than simply identifying this knowledge. We need to break the content descriptor into its teachable parts. For example when you are teaching mathematics to students you wouldn't teach an entire content descriptor (or even an elaboration) in one lesson, they would take numerous lessons to teach. I'm looking at year 6 in the number and place value sub-strand that there is only 4 content descriptors you couldn't teach year 6 number and place value sub-strand in 4 lessons, it might take 4 weeks it really depends on the learners. The coordinator has suggested looking at some mathematics textbooks used by students in schools, I have access to some of these does anyone else have access to text books? I don't have access to textbooks, as I'm not on prac. I could try at my daughter's school and see if I have any luck. But I do agree with what you've said, it is dependent on the learners. By breaking the content descriptors into small teachable parts, it should be easier to identify the issues and challenges that students face and where they began. Yep I do, I can get any year to look at, should I get one for each of us, for example year 1, year 4 and year 7? That will give us an idea of what they are doing in school. Well, in my prac school anyway, we are using math mentals. The newsagents sells others though, I don't think they cost all that much, we could always buy one each? That would be great if you could get one for year 1 Robyn, but if not I can always have a look at the newsagent. So I'm thinking that we need to each break down our content descriptors into the teachable parts and then anaylse where the learning comes from (previous years) and where it is going along with how to teach it, and the issues/challenges learners face at each of these steps. What do you think? Sounds feasible, also looking into where the misconceptions might come from too would benefit how to teach. I've added a table that begins to show the analysis of PK and DK but when I pasted it into the wiki it destroyed my formating and now it looks terrible. I tried adding a table to the wiki page and typing the information directly onto wiki, but it won't format either, not sure what to do?? What program did you paste it from? I created the table with a word document, I was talking to another student at uni tonight and they had the same problems, not sure of a solution yet. Yeah, I've done that before and just by messing around have sometimes been able to fix it others not. With my table, I just did it straight onto the wiki. Sorry I missed maths tonight, I have been on school camp with my prac class, it was an awesome time and actually very interesting to see how maths is used in everyday activities. Forming groups of a certain size, counting holes in a pipe on the beach and deciding if there were enough fingers in the group to plug the holes, stuff like that. Sounds a bit like what we did last night in lectures, but we were learning fractions. Michelle and I met early again and I showed her what I had done with the foundation to year 2 levels. I actually used the same layout as she had put up on the wiki. We were talking about tracing prior knowledge back through the years and in the older year levels it is quite easy to see these descriptors linking back to earlier year levels. The thing that we discussed though was prior knowledge for foundation year and do we just assume that children come to school already having a basic understanding of number? Not all children have gone to day care or kindergarten, so how do we answer the question of what prior knowledge they require or have for understanding? Michelle also discussed a math activity she did with her son that I suggested she talk to our lecturers about, as it may be of use when looking at misconceptions.

Thursday 28th March 2012 Just thinking a little further on the prior knowledge question we spoke about, would it be an idea to look at the C&K Building Waterfalls curriculum and use some of it to link to prior knowledge? A very good idea, any further information would be worth looking at. I'll search it up, have a look too and discuss later.

The procedural/declarative knowledge page: The table that I created in word then pasted into this wiki has lost its formatting and is very messy looking. It has been bothering me ever since and I have spoken to several people at uni asking if they have solutions, most answers were no, not sure, or just play around with it. Well I have played around with it and have had no success. I'm wondering if it would be better to remove the fourth column in the table and turn this into a summary just below the table, this would create an area for us to link to issues and challenges and the literature we need to discuss. What do you think? I will keep going with this document in word for now and see what else I can do with it on the wiki. I think it looks good. It's just as easy to read, so lets go with that.

Tuesday 2nd April 2012 I have just gone through all the boxes of my kids old school books and I have a range of maths textbooks for us to look through. I have Targeting mental maths for year 1, 3, 4, 5. NSW Targeting maths year P, 1, 2, 3, 4. Go Maths year 1, 2. I am sure there are plenty more because I should have every year level to year 6 but I cannot find them at the moment. Hopefully these will help us at our group meeting on Thursday. I have managed to get a copy of C&K Building Waterfalls (very hard when I'm not on prac) and I have been looking through that, I will bring it along with the other textbooks. I will go to Kunda Park to get a maths book relevant to the Australian curriculum and get back to you on how this all goes together. Still working on other assignments and will definitely get to maths over the next few days.

Thursday 5th April Was great to meet up with you guys today, I do feel bad though as I am concentrating on other assignments as well and feeling a bit of pressure to get them all completed, I have been neglecting maths, but I will catch up and do my bit. Please let me know how you guys are getting on and if there is anything I can or need to do straight away. Might as well multitask maths a well, if I can...lol. I love what you have done with the tables for setting out the PK and DK. I will do the same when I get stuck in. What time are we meeting on Wednesday? Is the maths lecture on at the usual time? Was great that you made it to the meeting, after you left we didn't really get that much more done, I think I stayed for another hour, so don't worry about missing anything, you definitely didn't. It was just good to just be able to talk in a group and see where we were all at. I found it easier than doing it via the wiki. Using the graphic organiser is helping with my understanding, breaking up the DK and PK makes things so much clearer. It doesn't seem so impossible when you tackle one piece at a time. I'm beginning to see that in little pieces the continuum is very manageable.

Friday 13th April Hi guys, to create the table in DK and PK page did you make it first in a word document with the content, or just the table and add the content in the wiki? Thanks. Have finished other assignments now and can concentrate on maths. I'll make up for lost time now....... I made the table in word then cut and paste it, I found that it works better when you enter and make space for the whole table, as when I pasted it in between writing it squashed it and changed the layout. Yay for finishing your other assignments ;)

Saturday 14th April. Hi there guys, we have chosen the biggest possible sub-strand, are we going to cover all the content descriptors and elaborations? Oh, and I have some iMaths books that align with the Australian curriculum. Will try to get some c2c stuff as well. If you do get a hold of some C2C stuff, can you email it to me, I haven't got access to any of this and as I have only come back this year I haven't ever looked at it. Me again, have pasted my table in though I am still completing it. Am I putting enough information in? I think what you put up looks good; it's actually good to see the links. I HATE WIKI'S........I HAVE JUST LOST 2 HOURS WORK.....ARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!! Oh no, that's horrible, did you type it directly into the wiki? I was so worried about doing that when I started because I'd never used a wiki. Hi Sharon, yeah, I was typing straight onto the wiki, will now do it in the word doc. and paste it in later......no luck with c2c, I don't have access either so will wait till I'm at school on Tuesday. Ok sounds good, thanks Robyn Hi ladies, its great that we are all starting to get our heads around this assignment. I know we are all learning a lot about the curriculum and seeing the connections between all the year levels. I have some C2C stuff around maths, so I will look at it and email it to you to see if it is helpful. Robyn, I would definitely say type all the information into a word document then copy and paste it into the wiki so you don't lose any work. Lets get stuck into this assessment and get it done :) I have just had a look at the C2C documents that you emailed, I wish I had of been able to get a hold of these before I completed the PK and DK and analysis, there is some really good information in there. I might need to add to what I have put up on the wiki :(

Sunday 15th April. Ladies you've done a fantastic job with your additions to the wiki. I have a lot of my procedural and declarative knowledge analyses in word documents so I will get them edited and onto the wiki. I think we need to begin to add activities that can be used to teach different issues and challenges. I'm not sure if these need to be on a new page or not as the pages are getting quite full and long, what do you think? Have either of you recorded the activities that Rob has spoken about in the lectures. I have some but not all. I have put up references and a few examples on the issues and challenges page, I have not put up many examples though as I was focusing on getting the information up. If you ladies see anything relevant can you start adding to it. With the activities that Rob spoke about, I have a few as well, but again not all. I think if we just start putting up everything we have, then we can start adding to each others information we can focus on the activities, as well as the issues and misconceptions. That sounds good. Agreement all round. Thanks for the c2c stuff Michelle. So wish I had access to the learning place. Getting through the PK and DK. Slow going as I need to remind myself of a lot of the terms and what they mean, that is helpful from my point of view, especially as I'll be teaching it next year. (Well I hope anyway..lol)

Thursday 19th April Today is almost the last day to finish our assessment. Sharon and I have been evaluating the wiki and giving each other feed back: I've noticed that the year 3, 4, analysis of content descriptors does not link to specific content descriptors in previous year levels. The issues and challenges page still needs some activities uploaded for single digit, place value, estimation and value of decimals. I've looked at estimation and why it raises issues, just need to add some activities. I've also added some pictures to the procedural/declarative page to separate the year levels more clearly and add some interest to break up the large volume of text that is needed. I have added in some activities for a few of those issues and misconceptions. Michelle you have done a great job with the pictures, I was feeling that the graphic organiser was so long and uninviting, the pictures have made it easier to find a specific year level. Sorry guys, I have had a vomiting bug today and yesterday, so nothing done, I know it's stressing you out. Am feeling a bit better now and will get onto what I need to do. Couldn't have come at a worse time............:( It might be good for each of us to read the parts of the wiki that we didn't upload to check for spelling, grammar, correct content etc.

Friday 20th April Good morning girls, I have added quite a bit last night and this morning, please let me know your thoughts and if you think anything is still missing, I have added activities to the decimal misconceptions, do you find it easy to understand? Robyn, yes it is easy to understand. I'm glad you have began putting things up, I was beginning to worry there a little. On the issues and challenges page, we still need activities for single digit numbers, teen numbers and estimation, so if you can help us with those? I think if its ok with both you ladies we should have a quick read over what we have put up and if there's anything that needs to be added we can discuss it. I just want to be sure that I have covered enough in what I put in the continuum. I would also like to say thank you guys, it has been a pleasure working with you both, personally, I have been able to learn a lot from completing this wiki. The maths misconceptions have been enlightening, as has all the research into the PK and DK. I have always found maths difficult and as a pre-service teacher know how important it is to improve and have a positive mind set regarding maths when I do teach. I now feel like I am improving at maths and my understandings becoming clearer.....Long may it continue..... It has been an interesting learning journey, at the beginning of this assessment I would have never believed that I could feel this confident to teach a student mathematics and know how to go back to the curriculum to find out where the problems lie and how to move past it. Although I do feel that I have only really grasped this learning in the past week and feel that we have only really just explored the tip of the iceberg with this assignment, there is so much more we could have looked into. Now I wonder whether this is why the second assessment is closely related to the first? Thank you ladies, I'm glad to have worked in your group.