Red Beach School/Featured teacher

Our featured teachers today are Hellen Healey and Susan Delaney who work together in a job share arrangement teaching one of our Y4 classes. This morning I watched while Hellen worked with the class investigating place value in numeracy. To do this the children worked with their fan numbers (all with one each) to display numbers focussing on the result of "adding tens and hundreds". To reinforce the concept Hellen and the children experimented with dollar values, such as what happens to our dollar notes when we add 20 to $457. The children were engrossed and engaged with the whole idea.

As an aside, Hellen integrated the school's Inquiry model, which we call Powerful Learning. As the children were working through their place value problems, she placed a very fancy silver hat on her head--the kids seemed to immediately know that this meant they would be discussing how they were learning powerfully. Their comments reflected this:- "We are now in the hub of the process, we are reflecting, we are imagining the numbers, we are asking ourselves questions."

A stunning example of the authentic use of the process of inquiry within the context of numeracy.