Mrs Rowntree

Teach. Grow. Inspire.

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about

Welcome, My name is Lisa Rowntree, the Aussie teacher behind Mrs Rowntree. Teach. Grow. Inspire. I have been working n education in excess of 10 years and I am a wife, a mother of 3 and a passionate teacher of primary mathematics. Before I decided to be a teacher, I worked in a credit union. My passion for maths originated from my love of working with numbers and I began to study teaching, while I raised my family. Now, I am designing mathematics lessons and units, alongside teaching. My intention is to continue to do what I love, while sharing my skills and hopefully helping teachers to save time.
  • Thinking About Thinking!

    Thinking About Thinking!

    The harder I can encourage children to think about their thinking, the less I feel I have to work! When I encourage children to reflect upon their learning, I find they begin to set themselves more appropriate goals and learn more. When students are setting themselves appropriate and achievable goals, then they are drivers of their own learning and growth. I believe this encouragement leads most kids to want to engage with the math content more.

    At the end of every lesson, I host a reflection discussion. Some kids are great at reflecting, and others can be way off the mark when it comes to self-assessment. Taking just a few minutes to talk about why they score their success at this or that is really key to helping with gauging their self-improvement. I try to ask how they will improve or maintain their score and discuss those learning strategies to strive for success & what that looks like.

    When kids can self-assess well, they can make really good choices about where to go for help and what to do next and even know where to start with ‘Let’s Go!, ‘Strive For Success!’ & ‘Mathematician!’ The more children reflect on their own learning, set their own mini goals, and strive to improve, the more their learning will enter their home discussions and drive exploration.

    In Mrs. Rowntree’s resources you’ll find a reflection page in every lesson presentation, like the one displayed here. Not only will children be encouraged to reflect upon their learning in accordance with the lesson’s success criteria, but also other students are encouraged to share their ideas and exemplary work to learn from each other. Head over to TeachBuySell at https://teachbuysell.com.au/store/Mrs-Rowntree to download a free lesson to try it out with your class and read about the teacher tips.

    Stay tuned for my next unit! Year 4 Fractions as Numbers on a Number Line. It will be the first of four units on fractions for Year 4 students.

  • Let’s Go!

    Let’s Go!

    It’s so difficult to cater to the huge difference in learning abilities that exist in each classroom. To plan for and develop all the differentiation and the tools required takes up so much teacher time, but it’s so important. This is so much of the reason why I set upon this little project to develop mathematics curriculum content for primary teachers; to help my fellow colleagues. ‘Let’s Go!’, ‘Strive For Success!’ & ‘Mathematician!’ are the names I’ve assigned to a 3 level differentiated learning task, provided in each maths lesson, to support diverse learners. Head to www.mrsrowntree.com.au to find the direct link to the resource on Teach Buy Sell. ‘Let’s Go!’

    ‘Let’s Go!’ is the entry point for kids who are not confident with the topic. This level is generally working below the level. ‘Let’s Go!’ allows students to get started on the transferable skill after the explicit teaching introduction. When I talk about the levels with children who begin at ‘Let’s Go!’, they so often strive to get to the next level to complete it. Mind you, they require the time from teachers to work through the levels. ‘Strive for Success!’

    ‘Strive for Success!’ means working at the level standard and if students don’t start at ‘Let’s Go!’ the rest of the students start at ‘Strive for Success!’, generally. The only time I let students begin at ‘Mathematician!’ is if I am confident they will find the ‘Strive for Success!’ level really simplistic and I know they are very capable. This is rare! 

    ‘Mathematician!’ is the Holy Grail! It is the celebrated level that when achieved successfully, one can’t feel anything but complete triumph! I have many students who come to me at that level and say, ‘Mrs Rowntree, I need your help’ and often I am working on the floor with the ‘Let’s Go’ group so I just have to respond sometimes with ‘What an achievement that you got there, it’s designed to be tricky, so now you are going to need to work through it with your peers’. You should see the achievement, once they start to experience success with figuring it out. Or, the joy it brings me when they come back the next day and they have drawn mum or dad into the learning process to divide and completely conquer the task!

    For all levels, I always encourage kids to work together to collaborate and explore their ideas when working on maths tasks. This can make for a noisy classroom at times, particularly with the loose parts on each table, or on the floor, and the discussions going on, however there is often much rich learning taking place in this environment. It is no longer an option to work collaboratively, but a necessity, to support developing social skills, social awareness & maths. The collaboration, experimentation, reasoning & justification all adds up to an active but rich learning space, where mistakes are ok, kids learn from each other and we end up with many opportunities to learn from, broaden our thinking and grow.  

    These are not the only ways you can work with these levels, but please try it and enjoy the process. I’ll talk about the other ways another day

    Good luck and enjoy the differentiation!

    ***To access the first lesson as a free download to try, please head to www.mrsrowntree.com.au and you’ll find the link to download it via Teach Buy Sell, under the Resources tab.