Professional Learning Goals

• Collaborated with colleagues to see what strategies they were using in their programs
• Gained greater awareness of number sense and numeration in kindergarten
• Gained awareness of different strategies to engage learners in counting, adding, subtraction, etc.
• Learned more activities to teach math and what to focus on
• A better understanding of the way that young learners follow a continuum of numeracy development

Activities and Resources

• Using the 5 frame to support the children during math. Also there were great ideas for subitizing and write around the room activity.
• Discussions with fellow teachers’ use of visuals to support discussions and classroom observations
• Games available in Lawson text
• Being able to spend time talking with the kindergarten team, hearing their thinking and experiences, and seeing what others are doing successfully in their classrooms was helpful
• Hearing other teaching teams share their experiences and teaching activities
• Actually there was a great video about subitizing that was catchy and the kids really liked that the other classes were using. Also, using the ideas from my colleagues was a great resource. The What to Look For book is a great resource as well because it had lots of simple activities to do.
• Alex Lawson resource What to Look For – including the games provided within
• 3-Part Math video’s fellow teacher sharing, ideas and input

Unexpected Challenges

The largest challenge we seemed to experience was the timing of booking release time. With snow days as well as other professional and personal responsibilities having to be considered in identifying dates for release, we often found that we had to reschedule our anticipated dates for professional learning.

When asked if there were “any activities that you felt were not helpful to your learning process?”, the common response was “No. Even if an activity doesn’t work, it’s useful to be able to look at it and see why it didn’t work and how to adjust it for next time.”

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

The group participants were asked how they felt the project enhanced their students learning.  Their responses were as follows:

• Gave me new ideas and the ability to work with my team to find out learning strategies that work for them and don’t work for them
• Students developing a greater awareness of number, counting and problem-solving
• Learning more about the continuum caused us to question if where our students were falling along it. We went back to basics to determine where our students were on the continuum, starting with the concept of subitizing. We weren’t sure if all students had mastered this. We saw that our students are ready to move on to the counting 3-times strategy.
• This experience has helped me become more thoughtful about mathematical thinking and development with children. It has helped me think about taking more time to slow down and taking time to understand what my students know, where they’re at and think about what steps I should take to help move them to the next level.

Sharing

Two members of our project team have been involved in an Early Years Leadership team that meets and participates in the Ministry of Education Pedagogical Leadership sessions. During our last meeting, we were able to share some of our work with the rest of the team, comprised of other kindergarten educators, the Early Years Itinerant Resource Educators, the childcare manager and the Superintendent of the Early Years for our board.

The project team members discussed in our last session how they felt that they would be able to share with new teaching partners some of their learning, as well as how they would shift their instructional practice in the new year.

As a School Effectiveness Framework school, our kindergarten teachers are involved in a Professional Learning Cycle with a math lead from the board. During our last PLC, we were able to tie the work being done through this project with that of the SEF initiative.

Project Evaluation

We feel as a group that the project was a great success. All educators were contributing members of the learning, taking on a leadership role to the extent that they felt comfortable. Most educators commented that they felt that they walked away with a greater understanding of mathematical strategies and processes, and were feeling more confident in their instructional decisions. A common belief was that the educators felt that they had a better understanding of the early math processes and strategies that lead to stronger mathematical knowledge.

When asked what they would do differently next time, educators responded that they would:

• have video recorded more of the learning in the classroom to show the growth of the students
• create more games to teach with
• read the textbook and take notes in greater detail
• perhaps visit the rooms of colleagues also participating in the project to observe first-hand the goal we discussed in our sessions