Imagine looking down

Having taught the mathematical concept of location as a relative position on a chessboard in the school playground, the teacher tests students’ understanding by getting them to draw known places, areas and items on the grid as they would be seen from above from a plane. The activity is modelled to another teacher who will trial the lesson with his own class.

The teacher leads professional learning in her school in the area of numeracy as well as teaching a combined Year 1/2 class. Within this context, she uses demonstration teaching to model to a colleague her approach within a Mathematics lesson. In this part of the lesson, she demonstrates how you can incorporate real world experiences into students’ learning, beginning with a chess grid in the playground to reinforce the concept of grid co-ordinates and a paper plane to introduce the concept of ‘bird’s eye view’.