Our lessons contained a mixture of online lectures or lessons, and onsite days spent in college. These onsite days are my personal favourite! It's great to be able to meet up with your class group and interact and discuss all things college-related. We all provide each other with that much-needed support that all Post-Grad students need. But on these particular onsite days for Mathematics, we covered all the Strands and sub Strand Units.
While we were covering the content at our Maths onsite, the valuable role of ICT was mentioned many times. I was thrilled to realise that I had managed to integrate ICT into all my Maths lessons on Teaching Practice, something I was very proud of! I had 3rd class (8-9 years) and this age group in particular, are very familiar with the use of technology and were very keen to learn, using technology in the classroom! I mentioned the website and the game I used in the classroom, to my lecturer on the day. My lecturer was very familiar with this website and commended the quality of the content on the website. This website is run by the BBC and is called 'Skillswise' (check it out here). They feature really good quality, engaging and interactive games that can be easily used in the classroom. I personally used the game, to consolidate my teaching of the unit of 'Weight'.
On the 'Skillswise' website, you can find games, quizzes and puzzles based on many different topics, not only in Maths, but in English too, e.g. Spelling, different types/genres of texts, writing a letter and percentage and fractions, shapes, and number based games. This website has an abounding amount of resources, ready to use!
The particular game I used, was based on 'Weight', and was called 'Taking Measures: The Weight Game' (check it out here). The children were familiar with the concept of Weight, by the time I used this game in the classroom. It was a great way to consolidate the learning that had been taught, while also as an assessment tool for my lessons. It introduced a really fun, exciting element to my Maths lessons. The pupils worked collaboratively in mixed-ability groups of 4-6 pupils. The competitive element to this game was something all pupils enjoyed and the room was always buzzing!
Here are images of the game in full-swing!
I organised pupils into mixed-ability groups for fairness, and each group came up to the Interactive Whiteboard one by one. The pupils lined up and each had a turn at playing the game. The groups were competing against each other and the team that completed the game in the quickest time were the winners. When calculating the results, we wrote up the finished-time and had to subtract it away from our beginning time, to find out how long each group spent playing. This was a great way to integrate our lessons into the Strand of Number. Each table also graphed their results each day on a vertical bar-chart. These were drawn on A3 paper and placed on the wall beside each table. This also linked into the Strand of Data in Mathematics.
Regarding the Curricular objectives that were featured in my lessons, pupils were being enabled to estimate and compare the weight of a wide variety of objects, using appropriate metric units i.e. kilograms and grams.
Regarding the Curricular objectives that were featured in my lessons, pupils were being enabled to estimate and compare the weight of a wide variety of objects, using appropriate metric units i.e. kilograms and grams.
In conclusion, this website is one I really recommend you browsing through, you're sure to find some useful activities, puzzles or games for your class. It's one I will be using again and again! Have you used any other good websites to integrate ICT into any of your lessons? Please share in the comments below, we're all learning aren't we?!
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