Start of the year: teaching values to set your expectations for the year

In my opinion, there are two crucial things to begin the school year with - team building activities and values. It is these two things that help students to settle into their new classroom, establish connections with their peers and understand the expectations.

Beginning the year with values (either school or the Key Competencies in NZ) is absolutely imperative for a number of reasons...

1. It sets up expectations for how you want your students to work and behave for the year.
2. It will be useful when creating your class contract or treaty.
3. It can be used to create a meaningful wall display. It is something that the students would have had an active role in creating, which can be used as a point of reference and a constant reminder of the values and expected behaviour your the classroom.
4. Is a great way for students to start learning how to work collaboratively.

This year at Glen Innes School, we have introduced our brand new school values. They are Responsibility, Effort, Ako, Commitment and Honesty... aka REACH. Since it was our first year with school values, it was super important that students made a connection to them. I expect my students to become role models to the rest of the school in showing the REACH values.  Here is how I have taught them to my classroom.

Bus stop rotation

The purpose: This activity helped students to recognise what they already knew about each of the school values - aka their prior knowledge. It is also a great way to maintain enthusiasm and energy, as students are at each station for a short period of time, and have to get up and move to each station.

Preparation: I created a Google Doc which I printed out as a3 and double sided. For each REACH value, there were four sections: What is it? Definition in a sentence, What would happen if we did use (value)? and What would happen if we did not use  (value)? Each 'value' is stationed at a specific group of desks.

'Bus Stop' activity in action

Instructions 

1. Students get into groups and begin at a specific 'station', where a large sheet of paper and some questions/prompts on it (or just one question/prompt if you want). 
2. Students work collaboratively to record their responses to the first question. 
3. After about 3-4 minutes, students get up and move to the next 'station'. 
4. Then, students read what the previous group has written, and adds their own ideas to the first question. If they feel they can, they move to the second question on their new sheet. 
5. This cycle continues until the teacher feels the students all have shared enough ideas and they have a good understanding of the topic.
6. Then come together as a classroom to have a conversation about what they can remember about each value.

Class discussion of the values 

Students' suggestions of values

Since it was the first time using these class values, we also had a discussion about their general thoughts on each value, as well as values that they felt were also really important. It was interesting that some students felt like commitment was not that important, as it could be tied into responsibility and effort. Students also spoke about Attitude, Respect, Perseverance and Courage. I was very proud of my students for being able to think critically and come up with additional values that could be used in our classroom. As a side note, students will soon come up with a response to the values and propose the addition of Courage into our school values (which I think is awesome!).

What does each value 'look' like?

After the bus stop activity, the class came together to think about how we could show our school values in the classroom. Students had to share their ideas on a collaborative Padlet, which was displayed on our Activboard. For this task, I let students work in peers. I explained that students would need these ideas for the next task.

Walking the walk

Next, in groups of around 6, students were tasked with staging photographs which showed the students using each value. I also told them that they could edit them with speech and thought bubbles to make each value clear.

Some of my students photos to show our school values

Creating a DLO 

A DLO (Digital Learning Object) is Manaiakalani speak for 'creating something to show what you have learnt'. Since a lot of students haven't done this before, the school values lessons are a great way to introduce DLOs. Students work in groups of 3 to create a DLO that explains their understanding of the school values. For each value, students MUST

• Have their own explanation of the value (use the bus stop activity and Padlet to help them)
• Include a their photo that shows the value in action (they can add in thought or speech bubbles to make the value more explicit)
• Explanation of why the value is important.

Quick plenary

As a second form of the 'bus stop' activity, students share what each value means. For this activity, cut up coloured paper (a different colour for each value) into strips. Again, I created stations for each of the values, and included a new value - courage, to the task. Students had to write their ideas in big letters so that it could be easily seen on the wall. 

This task is great because it serves as a plenary AND you can use it for your wall display, saving you from writing or typing them out yourself. Also, having the students write their ideas themselves makes the wall display more purposeful and meaningful.

Make it a wall display

Make some lettering, print out the photos and staple everything onto your wall. And there you have it, your first, purposeful and student-created wall display!

Our values wall display. Next to it is our class jobs and class dojo rewards and consequences (we came up with this as a class). Underneath those will be our class contract.

What's next?

Now you can use your lessons and wall display to help create your class contract or treaty. You can also refer back to your wall display to reinforce expectations in your classroom.

What my kids think about using digital tools

As term two draws to a close, it has been a great opportunity to gather feedback from my students. Along with my surveys about my teaching, I also wanted to find out my classes perspective on using digital tools.  This has been a massive change compared to how they had learnt in their previous classrooms.  I use digital tools on a daily basis, and not just Google Apps for Education (such as Docs, Drawing, Slides).  While I love teaching using digital tools, I wanted to know what my kids actually thought about it.

Digital tools vs. traditional Think-Pair-Share

I have spoken previously about the affordances of digital tools, compared to the traditional and verbal Think-Pair-Share approach. I have always believed that they increase engagement and participation, as they help students to feel comfortable and willing to share their ideas.  I also believe the quality of responses is higher. My own opinion on digital tools vs traditional T-P-S proved to be the same as my learners.  I posed the question: Do you prefer sharing ideas verbally, or with digital tools? Out of the 16 students who took part in the survey, 15 said they preferred digital tools, while one student said he liked both.

Here is what they had to say about why they prefer digital tools:

Because it is better

Because it's easy to use and it's really fun

because it  is faster and because half of the class don't even share there ideas verbally.

Because we can share our ideas and  I like the word clouds.

Because I can see everyone answer.

because I don't like writing on paper

because it easy and a little bit fast.

Sometimes I like doing it on both.

Because it helps us with our learning 

I like Nearpod because it helps us answer questions on what we learn and you get to write as many words as you can.

because it's good for us to learn 

I like nearpod because it shows your Ideas on the screen.

I like using it because we share our ideas with the whole class.

I like mentimeter because It has lots of things and its fun.

Because you can write more sentences.

Creating DLOs

As Glen Innes School is a part of the Manaiakalani cluster, our pedagogy is Learn, Create, Share.  I wanted to focus on the 'create' aspect, and discover how my students really felt about it. After students have learnt something, they use any app they like to create a 'Digital Learning Object' (DLO).

Essentially, a DLO is something that is created by the student to show their understanding.  A way that it is explained to students is that it can be used to teach somebody else.  Therefore, a DLO needs to be clear and easy to understand.

Again, I used a likert scale to find out whether they liked creating DLOs for reading, writing and maths. I wasn't surprised with the responses I received:

Overall, students enjoy creating DLOs to show their learning

It is pretty clear that my learners love to create DLOs about maths.  My class was relatively new to the concept of creating a DLO, so I initially focussed on creating DLOs in maths.  Now that they are experienced with creating DLOs for maths, my class absolutely loves it.  They are always engaged, and their DLOs are becoming more detailed and articulate.

While the response towards creating DLOs for writing and reading is still mostly positive, there are students who either don't like it, or feel impartial.  In an effort to boost their enthusiasm, I am working on introducing new tools for learners to use. I wonder whether their lack of exposure to creating DLOs in reading and writing has contributed to some of the students not enjoying it.  I am hoping that over time the students will enjoy creating DLOs in reading and writing as much as they do in maths. 

Students perspective on using digital tools

I used likert scales to determine how students felt about the commonly used digital tools in our classroom. Here are the results:

Class favourites

The most common favourite digital app was Kahoot, followed by Google Apps (Docs, Drawings and Slides) and Canva.  Some students chose more than one favourite, which is why there is more than 16 responses. To help make sure these really are my students favourites, next time I would list all the digital tools we have used to help learners pick a favourite. There is a possibility that the students choose these apps because they were spoken about and used in the last two weeks. 

Here is what they had to say about their favourite apps and why...

Read theory because when you are done read you can answer the questions 

google doc,google drawing,and more

Collaborative Problem solving

Cause it's fun playing on kahot! and plus learning from you  mistake.

kahoot because it cool

Kahoot, quizizz and canva

Quizzes because you don't have to wait for the teacher to press Next like on Kahoot. 

Canva because you can create your own posters 

I like kahoot because it's fun and it is also helpful

I like using them for work because they're easy to use.

I like DLO because it helps us what we did for maths.

Kahoot because we want to win so it motivates us to read the question carefully and be fast to answer it. Nearpod because I think it helps me understand that it doesn't matter if I get a question wrong, because I'm not the only one who got it wrong. Canva because I get to be creative and make inforgraphics.

youtube and because you can play music and a movie

I like mentimeter because its fun 

Kahoot because you can play games and learning games.

Notes:

• When students mentioned DLOs I counted this as GAFE because they mostly use Google Drawings and Slides to show their learning.
• I have copied and pasted the responses exactly how they were written - hence the typos and grammar issues.

Least favourites

Here are my students responses to their least favourite digital tools:

ANSWERGARDEN because it doesn't let us write lots 

Nothing

nothing I like all the digital apps that we use.

Nothing

Socrative because it dose not have funny meme's like quizizz.

Kahoot because you have to wait for the teacher to press Next.

Answer garden because you can only use 40 letters or 20

Mentimeter because I don't like how it is created. 

none because I like them all.

I don't have one.

none

play store because you can download games 

Answer garden all you got to do is write the answer for the question and the words get bigger  

Answergarden because you can only write like 40-60 letters

While the majority of students said they don't have a least favourite digital tool, the next most common response was AnswerGarden.  I think this is interesting because their reasons is one of the reasons why I personally like AnswerGarden.  Because of the word limit, AnswerGarden forces respondents to be succinct.  This can be a challenge for students.

Summing it up

It is great to see that the response to digital tools is mostly positive.  Digital tools help to increase student engagement, as they are more willing to share ideas and collaborate on tasks. My survey has also shown that the class prefers using digital tools over traditional verbal methods of sharing and collaboration.  I will continue to expose my learners to new and exciting digital tools, as I think this will help them to become more comfortable with using them.

Life Lessons with Short Films & Nearpod

Last term I did an awesome lesson which used two of my favourite apps - Youtube and Nearpod.  As the term was coming to an end, I felt that my students needed to be reminded of the importance of acceptance, kindness, non-judgement and tolerance.  I was talking to one of my workmates, not sure of what to do on a Friday. She said that she often used YouTube as a starting point for writing.  She uses CGI short film animations.  This got me thinking about how I could use film to help teach some concepts that I felt my learners were forgetting.  Then I remembered The Present.

The Clip

The Present is a very powerful clip that my kids loved! We watched it twice before beginning our Nearpod. I chose to let it run through without stopping or asking questions because I wanted them to take in the film as a whole.

Retelling

My first activity on Nearpod was using 'Collaborate' where students had to retell the most important bits of the film.  I was impressed by the level of engagement.  As always, I use their ideas as a starting point for further discussion/elaboration.

Inferring

The next activity was an 'Open Ended Question'. This was an inference question, which asked students to think about why the mum wanted to give his son a present. The next activity was a 'Collaborate' asking Why did the boy get so angry when he noticed what was wrong with the dog? The students were able to come up with some insightful ideas for both questions.

Evaluating

Next, students shared their opinions on the boys reaction to dog, and whether it was right or wrong.

Author's Purpose

Lastly, students shared their ideas about what the message was that the author/creator was trying to tell their audience.

Creating a DLO

After all the discussion that was drawn from the Nearpod activity, my learners created DLOs to share their learning.  I let them create anything they wanted. They created Comics, Google Drawings, wrote poems, recounts and wrote explanation pieces.

Summing it up

Overall I was pretty pleased with how this lesson went.  My learners were really engaged and it created a great opportunity to discuss being grateful, kind and non-judgemental. They loved the film and Nearpod helped them to feel eager to share their ideas with the class.  Creating a DLO was a great way for me to see what they took away from the lesson. It was cool to see the broad range of DLOs created. 

Summer School '17: Digital Enhancement

The MDTA is half-way through our last course before we begin our dissertations.  Our week-long course is jam-packed, as we learn about theories of learning, learning design, affordances and pedagogies relating to digital technologies.

Readings, Readings and More Readings

Since there is so much to fit into such a short course, we had 9 readings we had to complete before Summer School.  These readings were all very lengthy and wordy, with a lot of challenging concepts.  To help us understand our readings, we were set with the task of creating an engaging activity based on a reading. 

My reading was Affordance, Opportunity and the Pedagogical Implications of ICT  by Peter John and Rosamund Sutherland.  I found this reading incredibly hard to comprehend, and found myself having to read it over and over again.  I decided to create a quiz to help test the MDTA's knowledge of the ideas discussed in the article.

Creating an Activity

 I chose to use the platform Socrative, rather than Kahoot! Personally, I prefer Socrative for a number of ways. Here are some reasons:

1. While Kahoot's leaderboard feature can be great for some learners, it can also put struggling learners off.  With Socrative, teachers can choose to keep the student's names hidden.

2. The questions and answers are displayed on the students devices, as well as your main screen (through AppleTV, projector, SMART board, etc). With Kahoot, the answer options are displayed on the main screen, and the students can only see the multichoice icons/colours. 

3. Socrative allows you to create mutli-choice, short answer and true and false questions.  This is great if you want to have a variety of types of questions.  Kahoot, on the other hand, only allows multichoice questions.

Creating my quiz helped me to consolidate my understanding of my reading, as well as the other MDTA BTs.  Taking part in each others activities helped us all to gain a deeper understanding of the readings. This will help us a lot for our first assignment, which is based on the readings.

Reflecting on my First Year as a Beginning Teacher in the MDTA

It is crazy to think that I have almost completed my first year as a beginning teacher in the MDTA.  I have learnt heaps and grown a lot.  Here is my doco where I talk about my beliefs, the MDTA programme and how I use Manaiakalani's 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. Thanks to Dorothy Burt, Anne Sinclair, Fiona Grant, the MDTA BTs and the team at Glen Innes Primary who have helped me on my journey!  I am looking forward putting my learning into practice into my own class next year.

When the Learning Keeps Going: Ubiquitous Learning

The 'learn' component of this weeks digital immersion was all about ubiquitous learning. This is about ensuring that our students can access their learning anytime, anywhere and any place.  E-Learning and the use of Google Sites (that are open to anyone) allows for extended learning times. 

How learning is ubiquitous for my students

Class Site

As we are a part of the Manaiakalani cluster, all schools and classrooms are required to have a Google Site, which is accessible to all. In Manaiakalani schools the expectation is that learning is visible.  This means that every link needs to have the sharing permissions as "anyone with the link can view".  To make this easier we create a main folder in our Google drive that has the permission "anyone with the link".  This means that

Screencasts

I have recently created a Google site for reading and writing. To help ensure my students understand everything, I have included a range of screencasts.  The screencasts help to the explain tasks and reading comprehension strategies

Teaching DLOs 

I always ensure my teaching DLOs are linked into our class site.  These DLOs are quite comprehensive and cover everything I am planning to teach. This enables my learners to revisit the learning anytime they need.

'Modelling Books'

They are not quite modelling books, but they are my take on it.  Whenever we are learning something, I take photos of the students work.  This is then uploaded onto a shared folder onto Google drive, which the students have full access to.  A next step would be for me to add these folders to the site.

My Takeaways from Manaiakalani's Annual Hui

On Friday the MDTA were very lucky to attend Manaiakalani's 5th annual Hui - a place where teachers and learners across Manaiakalani celebrate and share their accomplishments.  

This has ended up being a rather lengthy post, as I gained many new insights from the teachers, researchers and learners at the hui.

In the morning

First up we heard our Manaiakalani student ambassadors share their learning.  It was really interesting to hear from students how they learnt in their school.  What I like about Manaiakalani is that every school is different.  Although we are all following Manaiakalani's 'Learn, Create, Share' pedagogy, each school is able to put their own spin on it to reflect the community they are in.  There were plenty of ideas that I will borrow and repurpose in my classroom, like the use of a 'Goal Wall' to make goals visible to learners.  

Following this, the Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher's shared their inquiries with the insights they gained along the way. I came away feeling inspired to give my own teaching programme a shake up to ensure my lessons are engaging, motivating and using digital technologies as much as possible.  Whilst I do believe I use technology a lot in the classroom, these teachers had come up with ideas that I had not thought of before.  Check out my infographic to see my main takeaways from the MIT.

Next up

After morning tea we heard from Rachel Williams about her holiday intervention programmes 'Summer Learning Journey' and 'Winter Learning Journey'.  Rachel's aim is to help lesson the 'summer drop off', where learners achievement declines between T4 and T1 after the school holidays. Her results show that students who participated in the 'Summer Learning Journey' had less of a drop compared to students who did not participate in the intervention.  Rachel's data was very compelling and I am excited to encourage my learners to participate in 'Summer Learning Journey 2.0'.

Next Woolf Fisher researchers, Rebecca Jesson, Stuart McNaughton and Aaron Wilson shared their insights gathered from observing teachers, and challenged us to consider what we are doing to accelerate our learners achievement.

Lastly

Dorothy, Russell and Pat Snedden spoke about where we are now and where to next for Manaiakalani.  Although we are doing a great job accelerating our student's achievement, we need to continue to reflect, refine and improve our teaching. We have a series of outreach clusters which are looking at us and using what we are doing to accelerate their learners achievement too.  Therefore, we need to be at the forefront of change and be constantly seeking ways to help our learners achieve.  Pat Snedden's talk was the most inspiring of the day.  He is so passionate about lifting our learners out of subsistence to capital builders.  I think Pat Snedden gave me the kick I needed to ensure that I am constantly doing my best and seeking ways to improve my teaching, because it is what my learners deserve.

I also used Twitter when I heard something which resonated with me.  Here is a collation of my tweets from the Hui.

The Importance of Audio: GarageBand 101

Learning the Basics

Today for Digital Immersion we were lucky enough to have Point England teacher and GarageBand guru Rob Wiseman join us to take us through GarageBand.  We went through all the basics of GarageBand like cutting and editing audio recordings, GarageBand shortcuts and creating our own music.  I wrote some notes of the tidbits I found useful, which you can find here.

Creating in GarageBand

Our challenge was to create some music to use with a video we had captured during the week.  I chose to use a video I took of the Zirka Circus performers that came to GIS on Monday.  The quality of the video is a little poor and the music is a little odd, but I felt it matched with the performers actions and their costumes.  I might refine it a little more by using iMovie to cut and match the song to the movements of the performers, but for now this will do!

My takeaways from my experience with Garageband

Infographics: a fun way to display data

Unfortunately I was absent during last Friday's Digital Immersion day, recovering from a procedure on my jaw. After looking at Dorothy's presentation and blog post,  and the blog posts from the rest of the MDTA team, I knew I missed out on an awesome learning opportunity!

Creating to share with infographics

The create aspect of the day was about creating to share using infographics. Infographics are a visual and fun way to present statistics.  It goes without saying that people respond better to visuals than a lengthy piece of writing.  The average human attention span is only 8 seconds, and our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.  This makes me question who wouldn't want to use infographics to show data!

Having a go

I created an infographic to display the data from my professional blog. There were so many infographic creator sites online, but I chose to use Canva.  Instead of using a template I decided to create mine from scratch as I had an idea of how I wanted to lay out my infographic.  There were lots of icons, images, charts and shapes to choose from, but the only thing that bothered me was that the charts were not editable, I had wanted to use a Pie Graph to display the countries of my visitors, however I discovered it was a set image that could not be edited.  I had heard that Piktochart allows you to edit your charts, which I will keep in mind for the future.

Why use it in the classroom?

• Fun way to display information which would normally be in the form of lengthy sentences.  
• Infographics grabs readers attention through its use of images and colour and short pieces of writing. 
• You don't have to be an artist or very creative to feel successful in your creation.
• You can choose from a wide variety of templates to get you going and get some inspiration.

Student's perspective

I actually finished creating this infographic whilst supervising a group of GIS students at a chess tournament.  When they saw what I was creating they were all really interested in what I was creating.  They liked the way it looked and had said they would like to do something like this in their learning.  One of the students said an infographic about their blog posts would be a cool thing to create and have on their blogs and classroom. Such an activity could empower, excite and motivate my learners to continue to share their learning on their blog. I am looking forward to finding more ways to use infographics in the classroom.

Purposeful Doodling: The Art of Sketchnoting

What is it?

Sketchnoting is a way of recording information using images, diagrams, connectors and text.  An amazing sketchnoter to look at is Sylvia Duckworth. There are three important components of sketchnoting: text, images and structure. When using text, it is important to consider the hierarchy of your ideas and highlight the most important aspects.  This can be done through using a different font, size or boldness. It is said that pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is definitely believed by sketchnotes.  You can use images and symbols to visualise important and complex ideas. Lastly,  to help make the structure clear you should use containers and arrows.  These help organise the flow of your sketchnote. If you want to learn more, Dorothy's post about sketchnoting is where you need to go.

Why sketchnote?

Instead of me writing about the benefits, have a look at this sketchnote!

Photo by Tanmay Vora

Having a go at creating a sketchnote

Sylvia Duckworth's presentation helped me a lot when creating my sketchnote.  This presentation could also be adapted and used to help your students begin to sketchnote.

I found it fun but also infuriating at the same time.  As someone who thinks creatively but does not have nice handwriting or drawing skills, I found it hard to transfer my ideas onto paper.  Another challenge was figuring out where to start drawing/writing, as I wanted to space out my text and images evenly.  Sketchnoting takes a lot of time, but I found that as I was doing it, my understanding of what I was sketchnoting was reinforced.  I had to think carefully about how I could summarise and synthesize what I wanted to say, which helped my understanding and memory.

This is the third of my attempts at sketchnoting my thoughts on why learners should share their learning online:

My advice... 

Do a rough pencil sketch to map out the structure of your ideas (size and style of font, words/phrases, symbols etc) and then do your sketchnote free hand.  Using pencil is too tempting to erase your work, and you could also leave smudges and holes in your paper. 

Using sketchnotes in the classroom

I can see the benefits of sketchnoting, although it would need to be taught in some detail before trying to use it in the classroom.  You could use sketchnoting in reading as a way to summarize the story, or write character profiles.  You could use it as a way to show your understanding of a concept in social studies, or a strategy in mathematics.   Another way you could use sketchnotes is for your wall displays.  You could create sketchnote information posters, class treaties, class rules and quotes... the possibilities are endless.  

Maths: Playing With Patterns 2.0

This week I have been continuing to extend my learner's understanding of algebraic patterns and rules.  It has been so awesome watching my learners confidence grow as they became more familiar with the process of finding a rule for a pattern.  What I also noticed is the level of engagement and enthusiasm of my learners.  The kids were hooked in and loving the challenges, as I gradually provided less support and created more complex patterns.  Also, learners who were quick to find the rules were able to help explain and teach the other group members, which was great to see. 

I had continued to use materials when teaching my lessons, which I think contributed to the level of engagement and enthusiasm.  The learners were able to notice patterns as they recreated the patterns made out of post-it notes and felt pens.  I sat back and listened to the learners and noticed that as they were recreating the patterns they were discussing what they were noticing about the rules. I think that these discussions strengthened their understanding of algebraic patterns and rules.

At the end of my guided lesson on Tuesday my learners were tasked with the challenge of creating their own algebraic rules and patterns.  This allowed learners to use what they had learnt over the past two weeks and apply it in a new situation.  They had to think carefully when creating the patterns as they had to make sure that it would fit with their rules.

Next week I will extend my learners further, by teaching them level four algebra. I will continue to use hands-on methods of teaching as I have found that this is really effective with my learners.

Maths: Playing with Patterns

This week in mathematics I am have been teaching algebraic patterns and rules to the the higher level students in my classroom. Figuring out patterns and rules can be quite tricky. Even I am not the most confident when it comes to upper primary mathematics, especially algebra.  Therefore I decided to make my lessons hands-on, so the learners could physically make the patterns.  It was my hope that by making the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th phase of a pattern, they would begin to notice patterns and make connections to algebraic thinking.  



We started off with determining the number of sticks used in a phase of a pattern.  We began with a triangle pattern.  The students quickly noticed that the number of sticks were increasing by 2, however this was not enough to create the 'rule'.  After the students tested out their theories, I illustrated that the triangles could be split into groups of two, with one extra stick left over.  Seeing the connection between the broken up sticks and the number of triangles helped them to notice the rule, n= (nx2) +1. After identifying the rule the learners were able to predict the number of sticks needed for the 8th, 27 and 38th pattern.

Following this, we moved on to a square pattern. I prompted the learners to think back to how we split up the triangles, and think about how they could split up the squares in a similar way.  Some of the learners instantly 'saw' how they could split up the squares, whilst some tried other ways.  This prompted discussions on why the learners chose to break the squares the way they did, and whether it would give us a rule for the number of sticks.  This lead them to discover that the sticks should be split into groups of 3, with 1 left over; giving the rule n = (nx3) +1.  Discussion was an important element of the lesson as it allowed learners to share their thoughts and justify their answers

I was surprised with how fast my learners were identifying the sequences and rules of the patterns, so I posed one more pattern to my learners.  It was in the shape of a house, with 6 sticks. Most of the learners quickly figured out a rule to count the number of sticks in the sequence.

Following this my learners created a DLO that teaches someone else about calculating rules for triangle and square path patterns. It was the first time that they had created a DLO in maths, but they did very well.  Here are two examples of the DLOs created after this lesson.  You can visit their blog posts by clicking on the images

 

My learners grasped the concept of finding a rule really well. I am looking forward to challenging my learners with some more complex patterns and rules.Next I will move onto more complex patterns and get them to create their own patterns that follow an algebraic rule.