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.
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.
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.
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.
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