Thinking about learning

 Student forget most of the work they have learned last year after the long December holiday.This is called  the summer slump. Even during the year, two weeks after you have taugh the work ,you have to start and teach it again.  How can you teach in order for the student to remember it for a long time? You can do revision before the exams.This helps but is forgotten after the exams. Doing old work now and again is called maintanance and  result in rembering it for a muck longer time. Chunking the work and spread it out is better than blockbusting and crashcoursing. Using acronyms and memory tricks help.  Reperition is the mother of memory. Do the same work in many different ways build memory. Emotional connection and  mindmaps is tools taht help memory. When students figure it out, struggle and discover the answers themself they have it for life  

 The Herald repord that more that half of students dot attend school regurlary in term two across New Zealand and across all schools Teaching emppty classrooms is quiet difficult because you have start all over again when a student walk in after  3 weeks of not attending school. Tou basically have to to teach the whole unit standard one to one with every student because the miss the begiining classes that link=d the lessons together. The stastistic in the Herald doesn't include who is justified sick, on school trips, attending culture and sport events during school time, attending weedings and funerals, Attending off site BCAT cources, Spirit of adventure and outbard bound trips Students come late and learn early , truancy ect- and we have No seniors  in class on Monday, result in very empty classrooms. Workspace is a life saver. Students who miss classes must catch up on work in workspace. Mrs David make videos  for students to watch when they returned from abcence....

 We attend a workshop at Epson Girls to learn how to plan for the newNCEA roll out next year. We have to teach the 4 new unit standards as well as the common assessmt to get 10 numeracy credits. How do you do it all in one year? The were three options to do the new NCEA. one was thematic, the other was to do one unit per term that is worth 5 credits Epson girls decided that they will do the common assessment in year 10 and only do one external at the end of the year for 5 credits and rather focus on level 2 in year 11. students who do not pass the common assessemnt in year 10 will be in a special class in year 11 and do the common assesment in year 11. St Cutbert has dumped the NCEA and Common assessment and write their own. Then they have control who pass and everyone will pass. Their argument is that it to much statistic based and therefore not good enough to prepare their students for Calculus in year 12 and 13.This is strange that they refuse to do the new NCEA because many of ...

 How do you make lessons more interesting? Doing worksheet after worksheet can be tedious and that is what most teachers do, in all subjects.We must find a way to get student more engage and involved ibn their learning. Science and History got the luxury to take students on trips.Out of classroom learning experiences.is something students remeber when they leave school. Visting Rainbows End to experience Physics G forces and acceleration, visit the Zoo to learn about biodiversity, scuba dive in Goat Island to learn more about marine life or going on a Hikoi to learn about local histories and walk up Mt Wellington .In maths we never go on a trip! No wonder it is boring. We have to find trips to send students on Science are doing hands one activities . Doing experiments where thing explode and launching rockets is engaging and real world.  In Art students draw and create artwork In usic student play on pianos, quitars and drums. In maths we do worksheets. Using real life example...

 Making lessons interesting and engaging This year i am going going to make an effort to make my lessons more interesting and engaging. How-many times did students said, I HATE MATHS  or  THIS IS BORING. I agree with the students . For years I have tolerate boring lessons and long speeches . The magc of Mathematics it makes you think. Some of the problems are difficult - it is- to make you think  Some of the work is not relevent to real life {not now anyway}and you are never going to use it in real; life and yes, it is not as creative as music and art. Thinking is the hardest work-- therefore so few people are doing it. And Yes, Plantations and TiK TOK is more intersting than doing boring sums. We compete daily for students attention, Getting their attention and keeping it. That is the real challenge.

Did the student achieve their results at the end of the year? Was motivation a critical factor in achieving better results? Did it work and how can we do better next time? In most cases it worked. Two students in year twelve got excellence for all their  unit standards and wrote externals,. The were very reluctant-and unmotivated to write externals. and tried their best to avoid it. However , they turn up and did wrote the externals. The rest of the class all got 14 credits were  My big focus was on the Year 11 class. There were many challenging students and it took lots of patience, strategies and motivation to get results At the end of the year most got 23 credits with three writing externals and we are hoping for merit endorsements from two.I spend lots of time disciplining and motivation students. The best strategy was to work one on one, that was very time consuming. However, 4 achieve  no credits and two others didn't het their numeracy. Attendance was a big issue w...