As has become tradition, here is my annual year-end blog post. I update and add new content to the pages part of this blog regularly but haven’t been creating posts regularly any more. And this year, I was on an educational leave for the first part of the school year until February 1 so this will be a shorter post!

Upon my return to district work in February, I was assigned three elementary schools to be the “point person” for from our district’s curriculum, instruction, and assessment team of teacher consultants. We are in the second year of using this structure in our district as one way to directly support schools staffs on a regular basis. I made visits to each school, often co-teaching in classrooms, chatting with teachers in the hallway or staffroom, doing lunch and learns or helping them find resources on the portal.

This year I have been working with the staffs at Anderson, Kidd, and Thompson.

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Some highlights from Anderson…

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from Kidd…

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and from Thompson:

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Every second year all stakeholder groups in our district come together for a district convention in February. This year it was February 16 at MacNeill Secondary. I hosted two sessions for grades 3-5 teachers (and had some secondary teachers attend!) that focused on the big ideas in number in this grade range – place value, fractions and decimal numbers.

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In March, I hosted two sessions for parents who will be having their children start Kindergarten next year as part of our district’s Decoda-affiliated IPALS (Parents as Literacy Supporters in Immigrant Communities) program that our new Early Years Teacher Consultant Megan Zeni has been coordinating this year. I shared some of the big ideas in Early Mathematics with them along with ways they could support their child’s math development at home and in the community.

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I began going to the Richmond Primary Teachers Extravaganza in my very first year of teaching in Richmond. It is always such a great event with fu professional learning workshops as well as time to reconnect with primary teachers across the district. It has been missed over the last few years and I was so glad to see it back this year! The RPTA Extravaganza was held on April 24 at Mitchell Elementary, coordinated by Ted Lim and his small team of RPTA executive members. I was excited to share an updated version of a science workshop I have done before called “Playing with Light”.

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In April, I shared our district’s Numeracy Foundations framework and resources, along with the Coast Metro Elementary Math Project website, with elementary principals and vice-principals. Following that, I was invited to several elementary schools to do “lunch and learns” about these resources.

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Along with classes from Grauer, I had several classes visit The Studio on math field trips this spring. Schools that had classes visit including McNeely, Tomsett, Westwind, and Thompson.

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A big part of my job this term in the area of “content creation” was creating resources to support the numeracy focus of our district’s strategic plan. Part of that focus is on computational fluency and I created several new K-5 proficiency scales and assessment record-keeping tools to support content and competency assessment around number concepts and computational fluency. I also hosted several K-5 burst sessions on computational fluency and joined Shaheen Musani to hosted a series of sessions for grades 6-9 teachers. Recordings of all these sessions can be found on the district’s YouTube channel on a numeracy playlist HERE.

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Here’s an example of the types of proficiency scale and supporting documents that I have been working on. Currently there are only available on our district portal (and being transferred to our new Richnet).

When I returned to work I joined in some of the district inquiry grant projects focused on Numeracy Foundations. Maple Lane was one of these schools and they were continuing their focus from last year’s project. As part of their project we were able to secure a school-wide Julia Robinson Math Festival at the school on May 1. The facilitator worked with every class in the school and hosted a parent event after school.

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Shaheen Musani and I hosted a session for K-9 teachers on May 17 about assessment in mathematics, with a focus on number concepts and computational fluency. We had a big room full of teachers thinking about assessment, proficiency scales, and how designing for learning and instructional approaches as well as reporting student learning, are all connected to the proficiency scales.

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In June, our district hosted a group of Community Field Experience (CFE) elementary teacher candidates from UBC for their three week practicum experience. The CFE experience allows teacher candidates a “behind the scenes” look at the district and also helps them learn about other teaching related jobs they can do with their B.Ed. degree, such as a district teacher consultant. I hosted the group for a day in The Studio at Grauer having a tour of the school and the different district programs hosted there, an overview of the district’s math and numeracy resources and then time spent with two grades 2&3 classes doing the type of work I often do in my role as a teacher consultant.

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Shaheen Musani posted into a newly created position on our team this spring – Grades 6-12 Numeracy and Assessment. Although we have worked together on many math and numeracy projects over the last few years, it is so nice to have someone else “officially” on our district curriculum, instruction, and assessment team with numeracy in their portfolio. We were able to work together in June to put together a map of connected professional learning experiences for K-12 teachers in our district next year.

In my 33rd year of teaching in Richmond, I continue to try and nudge my own pedagogies and understanding of mathematics. One project that was a highlight for me this term was the Sasquatch Math Stories project, described in this blog post HERE. Thinking about culturally responsive and place and land-based pedagogies, Indigenous Storywork, and Reggio-inspired principles and practices informed how this project was designed and how it unfolded. The BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project read the book Mathematizing Children’s Literature this year for their book club and that collaboration inspired this project with a focus on noticing and wondering about the text and illustrations and engaging in math investigations inspired by the story. We focused on problem-solving and problem-posing involving quantities, operations, and measurement for math tasks but students were also able to choose their own interdisciplinary project that had math as a focus. Some of their projects including creating story landscapes, weaving, and creating clay characters to scale.

One of my colleagues at Grauer knows the author of the book and shared the blog post with him. The following is his response:

Although I have some academic reading and writing to do this summer, I plan on reading these two professional resources as we think ahead to next year and professional learning in our district.

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As someone who likes to play with textile arts, the metaphor of weaving has always been a strong one for me. Throw in my Scottish ancestry on my maternal side and tartans – the concept of through lines also resonates.

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Some of the main through lines for my work this year have been:

How do we design playful and joyful learning experiences in mathematics?

What does it mean to proficient in mathematics?

What different ways do students develop computational fluency?

What connections can teachers and students make to mathematics? Thinking about self, community, culture, identity, place, story, daily life and math-to-math connections.

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Have a wonderful summer full of rest, joy, and adventure!

~Janice

During third term of this school year, I worked with Francesca Fotheringham and her grades 2&3 class in The Studio at Grauer to explore the local story The Sasquatch, The Fire, and the Cedar Baskets by Joseph Dandurand, an Indigenous author and Simon Daniel James, an Indigenous illustrator. We read a part of the story each week, drawing out the story experience over several weeks.

We began by “noticing and wondering” about the cover illustrations and title and the students made connections to Coast Salish design elements and forest fires. Many students had not heard of the term Sasquatch and I had anticipated this in my preparations of being “storywork ready” and shared a bit about the story of the Sasquatch in our region and how it is often called “Big Foot” in the USA.

If you are not familiar with Dr. Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork, you can find out more at the website HERE.

Along the way, we recorded connections and questions that came up for the students, often pausing together to do a mini-investigation of a mathematical idea. By doing so, we were enacting some of the ideas from the book Mathematizing Children’s Literature: Sparking connections, joy, and wonder through read-alouds and discussion by Allison Hintz and Antony Smith. Some teachers in our district were in a book club with this book as part of the BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project.

Two examples of mini-investigations that we did were figuring out the length of the Sasquatch’s foot at the beginning of the story and investigating the quantity of 1000 later in the story.

We read the factual information from the book and used a metre stick on the ground to model an approximate length of the Sasquatch foot. It was interesting that the book use imperial measurements so we had to do some mental math calculations to convert to metres and centimetres. Some students also thought about this information as they created scale Sasquatch characters for their stories, with clay.

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The quantity of 1000 came up a few times in the story – 1000 years, 1000 baskets and 1000 butterflies. To build understanding of the quantity of 1000, students were invited to build and make 1000 in many ways.

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After our weekly reading, students were invited to choose from continuing with a related project they were doing or to pose a math problem inspired by the story. We practiced posing problems a few times to develop important understandings such as the language structure and information needed in a story or problem, and the need for their to be a question or something to solve.

After many “drafts” of problems, Francesca had the students complete and illustrate a final problem to be shared with others to solve.

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A collection of some of the problems can be found here:

After reading the story, these problems could be projected on a screen for students to solve, printed and cut into problem strips for students to choose from and solve, or to inspire students to pose their own problems.

Some of the students were particularly interested in weaving and chose to investigate weaving cedar baskets as their inquiry project. They looked at my cedar mat and basket that I had learned to make from local Indigenous weavers and the students used strips of black construction paper to weave and figure out how baskets are made.

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A group of students played with re-telling the story or creating their own Sasquatch stories using shadow puppets and creating story landscapes with story materials. From these play experiences, extensions and variations to the story as well as math problems emerged.

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As we read the story, we also focused on knowledge building around local species, making connections to how math helps us identify and describe different living things. We learned about the cedar tree, salmon, local berries, and mushrooms.

Because this was an ongoing study, I added photographs and information we collected along the way to a “living documentation” wall in The Studio. The teachers and students both used this wall as a place of inspiration, to recall past experiences, and to go to for information.

As we came to the end of the story and read the last page, one of the students commented, “I thought there was going to be another page!” which gave us the opportunity to discuss story structures and how one type of local Indigenous story (again, see Dr. Jo-ann Archibald’s work) leaves us without a resolution that many of us anticipate in a story and instead, leaves us wondering what might happen or come next. With repeated hearing of a story over time, children, and then adults might take different meanings from these stories. In our BC curriculum the structure of “beginning, middle, end” is still included as “the” story structure and part of Indigenizing our curriculum and pedagogy is sharing stories with non-Eurocentric story structures such as this one.

At the end of May, we spent two sessions together finishing up math stories and projects students has begun as well as re-visiting the importance of the cedar tree to local Indigenous cultures.

We watched this video – Knowledge Keepers: Cedar Harvest – from the Museum of Anthropology about the cultural significance of cedar and how it is harvested, featuring local weaver Jessica Silvey.

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We also read more information books from Strong Nations about cedar. Some students then followed a berry design “math mat” pattern shared by Jessica’s studio to create cedar mats and others created their own patterns in their weavings. We made connections to the local berries in the story and I brought in some branches of salmonberry which fruit in this area in June, known as the time of the salmonberry in Musqueam culture.

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Another connected art experience some students chose was to create cedar mono prints using gel plates and they noticed the detail, pattern, and shapes in the red cedar that we used.

This interdisciplinary project was a way to ground a math project in story and make connections as the story progressed and was experienced in different ways, through retelling, using materials, building knowledge and creating story landscapes. It required some design thinking to consider how to navigate weaving between story, math problem posing, and interdisciplinary investigations but I think the students responded so positively to this approach to learning and thinking about mathematics, Indigenous knowledge and stories, and the world around them.

With thanks to classroom teacher Francesca Fotheringham and the grades 2&3 students in division 5 at Grauer for their participation and contributions to this project.

~Janice

Another year end summary blog post! I haven’t had time for regular blog posts again this year but have regularly updated and added to the resources contained in the pages at the top part of the blog and I hope visitors to this blog have found the resources contained in the pages above supportive to your practice.

For this school year our district curriculum team used a new structure for supporting schools. I was assigned four elementary schools (Tait, McNeely, Anderson and Lee) as my focus schools and visited those schools regularly, held lunch and learn sessions, facilitated pro-d day sessions, held collaborative planning sessions and co-taught with many teachers in their classrooms.

I also supported four schools with their Numeracy Foundations Inquiry Grants – Maple Lane, Garden City, Anderson and Hospital/Homebound.

Other projects this year included a series of lunch and learns and in-class collaborations with the staff of Quilchena Elementary focusing on math instruction and structures to support diverse learners in classrooms.

And a continuation of a project at Spul’u’kwuks Elementary thinking together with Katherine Myers and her grades 1&2 class about connecting place and mathematics through story. One aspect of this project was creating kits for the school and for our District Resource Centre with story maps and materials for other classes to use.

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Richmond is part of the BC Reggio-Inspired Mathematics Project and a group of primary teachers participated in regular book club meetings both in-district and at a provincial level as we learned more together about Cognitively Guided Instruction.

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This year I hosted several “BURST” sessions online after school, which is a format we began last year. These are short online sessions with a focused topic that are recorded and posted on the Numeracy playlist of our district’s YouTube channel HERE. This year’s burst sessions focused on instructional routines, our numeracy foundations frameworks, and math materials and how they can be used across the grades K-9.

A large component of my work this year has been completing the resources for the Grades 3-5 and the Grades 6&7 Numeracy Foundations Frameworks which are hosted on our portal and our part of our district’s strategic plan. I worked with a district grades 6&7 numeracy working group to seek input and advise on what supports were needed for teachers at this grade level. My colleagues Shaheen Musani and Olivia Miyashita collaborated with a grades 8&9 working group to develop resources for a grades 8&9 framework. Richmond teachers can access these clickable resources on the portal under Learn 38.

I hosted several classes from across the district (Anderson, Blair, Thompson, Garden City, Quilchena) as well as Grauer classes in The Studio. These experiences focused on making mathematical connections through materials and interdisciplinary concepts.

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And this spring, it was lovely to hold a series of three in-person after school professional learning sessions in The Studio at Grauer, focusing on math games, math storytelling and math making.

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As I finish this blog post, I would like to wish you all a wonderful summer! I will be taking an educational leave for half of the school year next year. I am looking forward to being back on February 1 2024!

~Janice

So all hopes of regular blog posts were dashed this year, with another year of unexpected personal and professional happenings. As we come to the end of another eventful school year, I thought I would highlight a few happenings in mathematics and numeracy within our district.

A main focus for me this year has been developing a K-12 Numeracy Vision and Framework as part of the district’s strategic plan. Related to this work has been collaborating with the district’s Early Numeracy Working Group which is comprised of RTA and RASA members, and developing a draft Grades 3-5 numeracy assessment tool in collaboration with teachers from Cook, Anderson and Grauer. With some experience now in presenting professional learning online, I also started a new online format of professional learning in our district in November – burst sessions. These short half hour online sessions for K-9 teachers involved a 15-minute presentation of a high-yield mathematics instructional routine which was recorded, followed by a 15 minute a question and sharing period with participants. All of these recordings are posted on our district numeracy playlist on our YouTube channel HERE.

This year our district trialled the BC Proficiency Benchmarks project for K-12 literacy and numeracy in our district. Teacher consultants collaborated with classroom teachers across the grades to develop literacy experiences and numeracy tasks across curricular areas and then use the draft benchmarks for assessment and then provide detailed feedback to the Ministry. We are awaiting news from the Ministry of Education as to when these assessment tools will be made available to educators across BC.

As a Coast Metro district, we were part of an online after school three-part elementary series with Dr. Marian Small this spring. Almost 40 teachers from our district participated with an opportunity to meet in grade group sessions after Marian’s keynote. I was fortunate to be able to facilitate one of the grade group sessions along with some of my colleagues from our Lower Mainland Math Contacts group.

I participated in school-based professional inquiry projects with a focus on mathematics teaching and learning this year. Three schools I made regular classroom visits to were Tait, Spul’u’kwuks, and Maple Lane.

At Tait, I visited K-7 classrooms and collaborated with teachers around instructional routines and lesson design.

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I did a half-day professional learning day in January with the K-5 staff at Spul’u’kwuks and then followed up in classrooms during terms two and three to explore some of the ideas we focused on, including outdoor learning and instructional strategies.

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Another project in a grades 1&2 class at Spul’u’kwuks was investigating different ways to connect stories, place and mathematics. The students wet felted their own story mats, connecting to the land, waters and skies around them. We used the mats as inspiration for story contexts in two ways: using CGI equation cards and mathematizing an area or issue of interest.

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At Maple Lane, I met with K-4 teachers to discuss ideas from the book Taking Shape which focuses on spatial reasoning. We followed-up with some non-tech coding lessons in classroom that played with ideas of pathways and position by coding on grids.

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I supported some school teams with their Innovation Grants this year including Anderson and Woodward that had grants that focused on mathematics. Several staff members at Anderson participated in a monthly book study of Dr. Peter Liljedahl’s Thinking Classroom book, meeting monthly to discuss what they were trying in their classrooms.

I also made regular visit to the grades 6&7 class at Woodward. The classroom teacher was investigating UDL in mathematics teaching and learning and we established a weekly Math Workshop which provided choices to the students in terms of tasks, complexity of concepts, materials, physical and digital tools, where they learned and who they learned with. We shared some teacher and student reflections for Education Week.

In April, Briana Adams, Ellen Reid and I hosted an afterschool in-person (a first in a long time!) session in The Studio at Grauer. We were investigating how materials and digital tools can enhance literacy and numeracy experiences.

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On the district professional development day in May, I opened The Studio to K-9 educators to come and investigate materials and resources.

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And early this month, I posted in to my position in the district for another three-year term. As I finish this blog post, I am preparing to leave for a CGI conference, where I will be sharing learning stories from our district.

So that’s a wrap on the 2021-2022 school year. Happy summer!

~Janice

Numicon is a research-based collection of resources to support the teaching and learning of mathematics, published by Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom. Several research case studies can be found on their website HERE.

Numicon is based on the Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract (CPA) model of learning mathematics. This is also sometimes known as the CRA model in the USA (Concrete, Representational, Abstract) and are BC curriculum uses the language of Concrete, Pictorial, Symbolic (CPS).

There are teaching resources, both physical and online, student books and the materials that are called “apparatus”. I have been particularly intrigued by what are called the Numicon Shapes after seeing many twitter posts by Simon Gregg that include them.

An individual set of Numicon Shapes includes the numbers 1-10 as in the picture below.

A box of 80 Numicon Shapes is also available:

I have created some investigation cards to use with the Numicon Shapes.

There area also number lines and other tools available to use with the Numicon Shapes. One tool I have invested in is the baseboards which are great for creating symmetrical or “double” designs on or for visualizing and making 100 in different ways..

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The Numicon Shapes apparatus can be ordered directly through the Oxford University Press website HERE but I have also found them available in Canada online through Chapters Indigo and Amazon.

A collection of free online resources are available through Oxford University Press HERE and I have collated some of them here:

We hope to have a district Numicon Shapes kit available soon through the District Resource Centre.

~Janice

I have always been curious to learn more about Froebel’s work and this summer I decided to do a bit of a deep dive and read more and play with the materials.

Friedrich Froebel lived in the 19th century in Germany and developed the first kindergartens. The Froebelian approach has been adapted all over the world and is based on the following principles:

• respect
• connectedness
• play, talk and first-hand experiences
• creativity
• freedom and guidance
• play outdoors
• community
• positive relationships
• well-informed and qualified educators

Although these principles may seem what is typical is most early childhood education settings now, they were radical ideas at the time.

The blocks that Froebel developed and how children engage with them are grounded in three ideas connected to the above principles:

• forms of life – using the blocks to create and represent things and events from the world around them
• forms of beauty – focus on the aesthetic, symmetry, pattern, order, design, etc
• forms of knowledge – exploring mathematical forms and scientific concepts such as size, shape, area, stability and balance

Froebel’s Gifts are early play materials intended for use by individual students and designed by Froebel and made by artisans in the communities where the kindergartens were. The German Froebel designed the first six “play gifts” (spielgabe or shortened to gabe) as educational materials that children would progress through and make connections as they played and built with the geometric solids . Further gifts followed and Froebel then developed what he called “occupations” to extend the learning experiences of the gifts. The occupations included weaving, sewing and working with clay. The occupations often transformed the materials unlike the gifts which were intended to go back in their boxes to be used again and again.

The following photographs are of Gifts 1-6 which focuses on the “solids”or what may also be called 3D geometric shapes.

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The progression of the gifts and occupations begin with 3D solids, move to 2D shapes then to lines, then to points and then circle back to using lines, points and 2D shapes to create 3D shapes. This progression is connected to the contemporary research of van Hiele’s hierarchy of geometric thinking.

There are clear connections to our mathematics curriculum as students learn about describing and comparing both 2D and 3D shapes. There is also a focus on spatial reasoning in how the gifts are used as students move the shapes, observe them from different perspectives, compose and decompose and transform their orientation.

One of the many interesting stories I came across on the impact of these gifts was about architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His mother was a Froebelian educator and he has distinct memories of playing and building with the the three distinct maple wood blocks. He commented that those shapes were “in” him through those early experiences and inspired many of his designs.

Two books that I read this summer:

Some resources I found online that were helpful include:

1. Froebel Gifts

https://www.froebelgifts.com/gifts.htm

This site explains each gift in detail including forms of life, knowledge and beauty. Videos are included. A brief introduction to kindergarten and the Froebel philosophy are included.

2. Froebel Trust (UK)

https://www.froebel.org.uk/training-and-resources/froebels-gifts

This website has a lot of information about the history of Froebel’s philosophy and the use of the gifts. It also includes current research and resources to support early learning. There are a set of downloadable pdf “pamphlets” including one on Froebel gifts and block play that makes connections to how blocks are often used in current early childhood settings.

3. Garden of Children Project

The Garden of Children Project looks at the Froebelian approach in the USA and has collected video, transcripts, images and interviews in order to compile a documentary. Short video clips can be viewed on the website here:

https://gardenofchildren.org

Online stores that I ordered materials from:

1. Red Hen Toys (American – needed to email to sort out shipping to Canada)

https://redhentoys.com

They have a page/tab dedicated to Froebel Materials included books, gifts and occupations and related materials.

2. Thinkamajigs (Ontario)

https://www.thinkamajigs.com

They have a Froebel tab in their shop which has the gifts and some of the occupations.

Current math education research is highlighting the importance of spatial reasoning to overall mathematics development and achievement. See here if you are interested in reading more. The more I learn about the Froebelian approach, I am reminded how these ideas have been highlighted since the 19th Century. We just sometimes let things drop or prioritize other areas of learning when we need to remember to think more holistically and that learning in ultimately about relationships and connections. I am thinking about ways to share these “gifts” with students and thinking of other ways to use these ideas and will share these investigations on twitter and Instagram.

~Janice

Usually in June, I am reflecting on the professional learning projects from the school year and writing my annual summary report. But this year was a little different…and for purposes of reflection and documentation, I have written about my year of supporting Transitional Learning.

We began the 2020-2021 school year with uncertainty, not sure how things were going to unfold. On September 14 I was re-assigned from the district teacher consultant role to being what our HR department called “general teacher” and being responsible for supporting 4000 K-7 students in mathematics and science who were learning from home due to the pandemic while several thousand students attended school face to face in our school buildings. We had just a few days to imagine what this could be and within a week we were “live” with weekly learning plans posted to our portal and live webinars and Zoom meetings scheduled. I was part of a new team of re-assigned teacher consultants who were also supporting students at home in the areas of French Immersion, Language Arts/Social Studies/Career Education and Arts Education. The first few weeks tested me in new ways and I do not think I have ever felt that degree of stress and responsibility in my entire teaching career.

I learned how to use a whiteboard within a confined space that was visible during webinars and how to teach to hundreds of students at a time that I didn’t know and layer language, gestures, visuals and other supports for their learning.

I learned all the new tools involved with this type of remote learning – webinars. Zoom meetings, using an iPevo mirror-cam and a HUE document camera. I used sites such as desmos and a variety of virtual manipulatives and online resources from Mathigon, the Math Learning Center and Toy Theater.

Each week I developed and wrote four math and science plans (K&1, grades 2&3, 4&5, 6&7) prepped and delivered four live webinars, filmed and edited a weekly overview video, held a weekly webinar for parents and caregivers and hosted a Zoom session for TL teachers each week. It was a lot. I kept telling myself that this was my way of serving the district this year until February 1…

One of the highlights of the fall and winter was inviting our K-3 TL students to submit videos of themselves counting from 1-10 or 20 in their home languages. I then shared these videos during the primary math webinars and we practiced counting in different languages including sign language. I now have a collection of counting videos in over thirty languages!

I continued to develop a SD38 YouTube elementary math channel that I started in the spring of 2020 when we all were staying safe at home. I never thought that I would have a YouTube channel. My sons think it is quite hilarious! It has many many videos now – weekly videos for the TL learners and their families teachers are unlisted but all the math games and projects are public. You can find it here: https://bit.ly/SD38mathyoutube

In schools, TL teachers supported their students with regular Zoom meetings and assessed the mathematics assignments that students posted to their eportfolios. I found it increasingly difficult to see that there were hundreds of students in the webinars but not be able to see them or even see their names. It is hard to connect and develop relationships through the camera on your laptop! During the week before the winter holidays, I offered some optional Zoom math studio sessions which were well-attended and I finally felt some joy in the work I was doing.

The Board then voted to extend Transitional Learning to spring break. Some students returned to their schools on February 1 but most continued to stay at home. I held weekly Zoom math studio sessions for primary and intermediate students and added a primary math storytime each week. These sessions were the highlight of my week and I began to get to know many of the TL students through this format. During this time, one of our teacher consultant colleagues was asked to take on the science component of the planning and I was able to streamline a few things in my weekly plans in order to make time for a 20% return to my teacher consultant work. For this part of my work I focused on our district’s numeracy visioning and framework development and the Ministry’s numeracy proficiency standards project.

One of the highlights of doing Transitional Learning was seeing the math and numeracy tasks and projects that the students did. Some teachers shared their students eportfolios with me and other teachers or parents would send me emails with student work attached for me to see. For some tasks and math studio projects, I created padlets for students to share their projects with each other.

And then just before spring break, the Board voted to extend Transitional Learning until the end of the school year. This was a hard and difficult year, not just for me and my colleagues supporting Transitional Learning but for everyone. I kept reminding myself of the students, many who had been at home since March 2020, and continued to do what I could to serve and support the students, families and teachers I had been tasked with supporting this year.

June has brought a lot of “lasts” – last video filmed and edited, last project posted, last math game shared, last primary math storytime, last set of studio sessions and I took a photo of the portal screen when I posted the final week of TL math plans – Week 36. And on Wednesday, June 23, I hosted my last live math webinars – what a year.

I never expected in September 2020 that this would have been my year. I did a completely different job than what I had “signed up” for. I learned a lot about myself, my district, our families and students. And I learned that regardless of the context, in person or remote, the heart of teaching and learning is relationships. So yes, there has been a LOT of math for me this year, but learning to nurture connection and care through a web cam has been at the essence of my work this year.

For the final week, I asked students to reflect on and celebrate their math learning from this year. We had done some different weaving projects and I invited students to use those techniques to weave together their reflections, goals and celebrations of learning. I decided to do the week 36 project as well and invited students to share their final projects on a padlet. It was so lovely to read over what the students shared.

It was both an honour and a pleasure teaching this group of students and I hope as many of them return to our schools in September that I might actually get to meet some of them in person!

Take care and have a wonderful summer.

~Janice

In February 2021 I was able to carve out one day a week from my Transitional Learning duties to work on some district numeracy projects.

K-12 Numeracy Vision and Framework

Our school district’s board has a new strategic plan for 2020-2025 and the first priority is Inspired Learners. One of the goals for this priority is: the district builds literacy, numeracy and digital literacy through innovation and a commonly held vision. And the objective I have been focusing on is 2. develop and implement a K-12 numeracy vision and framework. The team I have been working with includes secondary curriculum teacher consultant Shaheen Musani and Kate Campbell of the District Support Team. We have had regular meetings this last term with the district executive team and our parallel literacy team to develop a vision statement and framework, including a visual image that we hope will be “clickable” online and lead to resources and supports for educators and family and community members. We have been able to get feedback from teachers in the district who have been involved with numeracy working groups and projects over the last two years and look forward to continued development of the framework and stakeholder feedback. The overall goal of this vision and framework is to consider what is a numerate learner and how do learners experience numeracy across all areas of learning and contexts.

Ministry Proficiency Project

The BC Ministry of Education is developing new literacy and numeracy performance standards. Last summer myself and some other teacher consultant colleagues were in the first development group and shared literacy and numeracy tasks from Richmond classrooms. A provincial K-5 working group has further refined what are currently being called proficiency benchmarks and this spring several teachers in our district trialled numeracy tasks and provided evidence/illustraitons of learning for the different numeracy aspects and sub-aspects. The provincial working group will continue to refine the proficiency standards this summer and the grades 6-12 proficiency standards should be available next year with final numeracy performance standards available by 2023.

The following table shares the current numeracy aspects and sub-aspects that are included in the assessment tool:

Update K-2 Numeracy Assessment Resources

With a focus on early numeracy, our district developed a K-2 numeracy assessment resources from 2017-2019. Those resources can be found here: https://blogs.sd38.bc.ca/sd38mathandscience/sd38-k-2-numeracy-assessment-information/

This spring some updates, revisions and additions have been made to the resources and they will added to the above link as well as to the Mathematics and Numeracy tile on the portal.

Numeracy Presentations from May 21

On our district professional learning day on May 21, I shared a short informational session for K-5 on the different numeracy initiatives and projects in our district. Shaheen Musani joined me for a second session with grades 6-9 teachers. The slides from both sessions can be found on the district portal in the Mathematics & Numeracy tile.

SD38 Numeracy Tasks and Resources

On the portal, under Learn 38. under Resources for Teaching and Learning 2020/21, under Curriculum Specific Links and then in the Mathematics & Literacy tile, you will find several links to numeracy resources. A direct link is HERE for SD38 employees.

Also on the portal in Learn 38 are all of this years’ weekly math plans for Transitional Learning. For each grade, in each week, there is a numeracy task. Some of these tasks are intended to help students build their understanding of what numeracy is and others are tasks that students need to use the numeracy processes of interpret, apply, solve, analyze and communicate.

What are some actions you can take to support the development of numeracy within our district?

#SD38numeracy

~Janice

Who could have predicted when we left for spring break on Friday, March 13, that we would not return to school as we have known it, for the rest of the school year. This spring has brought announcements, updates, change of plans, curveballs and new information and expectations on a regular basis. A global pandemic has brought changes to our lives, and to teaching and learning.

I never expected to have a YouTube channel, to be Zooming multiple times a day or to be doing live online math studio sessions but that’s what happened!

YouTube channel with math game and math studio videos

A highlight of each week was Thursday mornings when I took our math studio experiences online via Zoom. I hosted a primary session that usually had 30-40 students join in, and then an intermediate session that grew to about 15 students. I bought a special arm to hold my phone to use as a document camera so that I could do demonstrations for the students.

Some of their favourite projects were mazes, origami, cardboard shape structures and using the digital microscope.

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The children in the Zoom sessions found ways to connect with each other – waving, calling out and commenting in the chat box. I loved hearing their little voices calling out, “Ms Novakowski, I need help…” as they worked on a project, holding it up to the screen for me to see, with a look that suggested that maybe I could reach through the screen to help them. These Zoom sessions highlighted the importance of the need for interaction during this time.

I also was fortunate to continue my learning with the grades 5&6&7 class an their teachers at Quilchena through Zoom math chats and numeracy tasks. More information can be found HERE.

I had regular weekly or bi-weekly Zoom chats with several small groups of educators throughout the term. Sometimes we were just checking in with each other but other times were time for planning together, sharing ideas and collaborating.

I also spent more time focused on content creation this spring than I have in a long time – from K-7 weekly math plans, interdisciplinary projects, math game resources and at-home learning ideas for families. It was an opportunity for me to think about connecting the dots across the grades as well as across curricular areas. Most these new resources are curated on our district portal, as well as on a page on this blog here:

BC Continuity of Learning

Every Wednesday at 2pm, about twenty Lower Mainland educators in similar roles as mine met via Zoom to share ideas and resources around math education during this time. As events and protests here in North America amplified the important discussions around anti-racist practices in education, Shaheen and I were asked to sharing some of the work we have been doing in the district around re-humanizing mathematics through culturally responsive pedagogies and investigating social issues. This focus re-framed much of the discussion within this group and our planning for professional learning opportunities for next year. Some reading and resources can be found HERE.

At this point, as we come to the end of the school year, it is still unknown what September will bring. We have learned to much and developed so many new skills over the last three months and we will adapt again in September. For now, I am going to let go of some of my wonderings – wondering how The Studio and its focus on materials might look in the fall and wondering what format my district role and responsibilities will take on.

I’m looking forward to a summer of rest and rejuvenation through spending time with my family, my backyard, reading, creating, learning new things and enjoying the outdoors (and spending less time on Zoom).

Take care,

~Janice

As the province moved to remote learning from home due the COVID-19 pandemic, the Quilchena teachers and I met via Zoom to plan numeracy experiences for the students that were connected to our current context. I joined in on the class’ Zoom meetings for Math Chats where we did routines like number talks and WODBs and also built content knowledge to support projects and numeracy tasks.

Two the at-home numeracy tasks the students engaged in this spring were Acts of Kindness and Garden Design projects.

In response to the pandemic and in-school instruction being suspended, we thought about ways for the students to connect to each other and the community. They were asked to participation Acts of Kindness. Some students painted rocks to leave around the neighbourhood while others created signs to put in the front windows of their homes. We also asked the students reach out to their classmates through phone calls. We asked the students to consider the “ripple effect” of their acts and to create a visual model to show the impact. The following are some of the students’ visuals which some also connected to ways to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

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Another numeracy task the students did was a plan and design task, creating garden beds, boxes or containers. During our math chats, we learned about different kinds of polygons, how to calculate area and perimeter and then volume. Students were also asked to research and budget for how much soil they would need.

The following is the final task criteria:

And some examples of student submissions:

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I am looking forward to continuing this numeracy project with this class next year. With thanks to teachers Jen Yager, Sam Davis and Christine Gerencser.

~Janice