Focus

APST 1.3	Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.
APST 1.4	Strategies for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
APST 1.5	Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.

Standard 1: Know students and how they learn.

I planned and taught a sequence of math lessons for my prep/1 composite class. The unit was devised using the strand Number from the Australian Curriculum version 9. My class was comprised of Indigenous students from the surrounding area. As such all students were English as a second language (EAL/D) learners from low socioeconomic backgrounds. There parents worked in the town with some working in ‘fly in, fly out’ jobs, making family life a little disruptive. These circumstances were considered when creating the lessons to ensure the students had a stable learning environment with a variety of options for working from home when needed.

In my initial lesson, I discussed fishing with the students (APST 1.4), as this was an activity, they were all familiar with (8 Ways, n.d.) and as a class we discussed how they caught fish, where they caught them, how many were caught and what was the biggest fish they had ever caught. After a few minutes of a very lively and engaging discussion I introduced the students to the song (artefact 1), ‘One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive’, the arrangement I used was done by Nick Hall (Nursery Tracks, 2013). We watched the Youtube video (APST 1.5), then followed along using hand gestures (8 Ways, n.d.).  Next, I took the students outside and we collected five rocks each, we sat in a circle outside, and I asked the students to place their rocks in a line, then we started counting around the circle. In this way the students could see that numbers were continuous. We went back into the classroom and discussed how numbers looked, I then divided the class into four heterogeneous groups and arranged four activity stations which the groups would rotate through, in this way differentiation was achieved, as the stations had very different ways for learning number (APST 1.3). Station one was a worksheet (artifact 2), station two was sand beds (here students could write their numbers with their fingers in the sand) [artifact 3], station three was the song (artifact 1) we had learnt and station four was jump counting using a number line (artifact 4). For students who were away I emailed their parents the worksheets and made available hard copies for those who did not have printers at home. I also used the review strategy (Mind Tools, n.d.), to ensure the knowledge students had learnt the day before was transferred from short term memory to long term memory, this was achieved through reviewing the content again, before continuing on with new content.

Reference

8 Ways. (n.d.). 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning. https://www.8ways.online/

Mind Tools. (n.d.). Review Strategies. https://www.mindtools.com/aiz7df1/review-strategies

Nursery Tracks. (2013). Nursery Rhyme – 1,2,3,4,5 Once I caught a fish alive. YouTube.

Artifacts

Artifact 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ir_l7qTiZ4

Artifact 2:

Artifact 3:

Artifact 4: