My name is Kathleen Lewis.
I teach at Pleasant Street Primary School
and I teach Grade 3/4,
and I'm also a member of the ICT team.
In my maths lesson today, we're going to focus on exploring
adding, subtracting and dividing whole numbers and parts of numbers.
And we're going to take those maths skills
and use them in a real-life situation
and we're going to build our own business.
OK, today we're going to explore
adding, dividing and multiplying whole numbers and parts of a number.
And we're going to use these maths skills in a real-life situation.
So what we're going to do is we're going to be logging on to the blog
and we're going to be going onto
an interactive game called 'The Coffee Shop'.
I want you to click 'play' straightaway.
Click onto play and it's going to ask you, it's going to have two sections,
it's going to have your inventory and it's going to have...
To support my lesson today, we're going to be using
an interactive maths game called 'The Coffee Shop'.
This maths game allows the students to be engaged in the lesson
and it allows them to use their maths skills in a real-life situation
where they'll be creating a business
and they'll have lots of factors that come into place.
What I intend to do today with my lesson is work on
a whole part whole scenario where I have all the children
on the floor to start off with for the introduction,
and I'll be modelling what we're going to be doing today
on the Smartboard and on the whiteboard.
How many teaspoons of sugar are we going to be using?
BOY: Two per unit, or cup.
We're going to be using two per cup, fantastic.
And we've only got 20 teaspoons of sugar, that's all I've given you.
Then once the activity has been explained
and the children understand what the instructions are,
they'll move back to their laptops,
and that's when I bring my focus group down to the floor.
My focus group today is going to be an extended focus group
and they're going to be working on decimals,
and they're going to be able to alter their recipes to make sure
that they can use either whole numbers or decimals in their recipe.
My colleague Lachlan and I like to trial a lot of resources,
especially ICT resources,
just to see how they work in the classroom
and how they work in an actual classroom context,
to see whether the students are engaged in the lesson
and if they're actually benefiting our teaching and our planning
and the students' learning.
So by being able to trial these resources,
then we have a better idea of whether
these resources are something that we can bring to the whole school
and it's something that we can bring to the teachers
through maybe a whole school meeting or our unit meetings.
So by Lachlan coming in today, we can work together as a team,
trial the resource, see the students' reaction to the resource
and then we'll be able to take that resource
and take it back to our meetings.
Now, is there anything else that you think
that you need to change in there as well?
We need some milk.
Yep, you're out of milk. So you've got $16.20 to spend.
OK, and then we add it up. Zero, five, six, seven.
-How much are you going to need? -STUDENT: 75.
75 teaspoons of sugar.
As part of the ICT team, we've been looking at resources
to be able to target the learning needs of students.
We're able to use things like blogs and wikis
and also things like Cartoon Me and Vimeo.
A lot of the resources that I have on my blog are at particular levels,
and the students know which ones that they enjoy doing
and which ones that they are capable of doing.
I think the lesson went really well today.
It's such a big lesson to do. It's a really big resource.
There's probability, there's division, there's multiplication,
there's business strategies, there's so much in it.
You just need to make sure that
you're planning to cater for your students' needs
and give them a particular learning intention at the start of the lesson.
ICT resources are good in that case
because it's so engaging and so exciting for the students
that it allows the students
to be able to trial things and also make errors,
and it helps them to reflect on the process,
and to actually have a look at it and say,
"What went wrong? What can I do better next time?"
Today's lesson in Kate's room was a chance, I suppose,
for the two of us to once again work collegiately together,
which we get a lot of opportunity to at Pleasant Street Primary School.
And within Kate's grade today,
she brought lots of maths into the classroom,
but along with that learning, the numeracy side of things,
there was the ICT skills being taught,
there was other knowledge being gained by the students.
KATHLEEN: Lots of conversations amongst the students.
- Really good to see. -LACHLAN: Fantastic conversations.
And it's a real positive for us as teachers to be able to see
how other teachers are interacting with the students,
how tools are working in Kate's room,
and then I can take those back into my classroom as well.
So it's just another way for us
to share our understandings and our ideas and how...
Trial resources, really.
..most importantly, to improve student learning.