MPI - Day 5 : Algebra

This has been my favourite day by far. Firstly, I really enjoy teaching algebra, and secondly, I learned a lot that was relevant to my ākonga working at Phase 3. What does keep going through my mind is when we were doing an activity using a variety of strategies and it was discussed how important it is for students to know there is more than one way, which I do know, but it took me back to why I enjoyed maths so much growing up. That being it was black and white. We learned how to do a problem, followed through a model, and learned to self-check.  Unlike English where I never quite knew what assessors were assessing :). How times change!

Vicki Archer gave a fab intro to the day, took me back to DFI days. I learnt about inserting special characters which was very handy, and also reminded me about the Digital Dig. I totally agree a more advanced one would be very timely. 

The Maths Talks - Number Talks session was valuable for me. I was a wee bit confused about the types of problems we were meant to put to our class for this, so this session with examples was very helpful. 

I am definitely still an amateur at using technology / creating resources using technology etc, partly because I am so slow, but also because I guess that's not how I learned. Hands-on sure, but I am now starting to build up my digital maths resources thanks to RPI. This is undoubtedly a huge benefit for me personally. The Think Boards / Frayer model/ vocab pages are all being added nicely to my collection. 

There was a lot on the taskboards/sessions today that I will definitely take directly and use with groups in my class, and as we are about to start algebra the timing couldn't have been more perfect. I am looking forward to integrating Maths Talks into my daily in a more formal manner than I have previously.