Planning a Maths Programme

Day 3 in the Mathematics Practice Intensive was all about Planning a Maths Programme.  Not, here is what you need to do, now go and do it but here are all the options and resources, choose what is best for you and your students and go and do it.  

It's amazing after each day of this intensive learning in maths how my thinking and reflecting on best practice is altering and my list of what I would like to change or freshen up, as we keep saying, is swirling around in my head.  I have that slightly annoying quality that really makes me want to freshen it all up immediately and be doing it as perfectly as possible (What would that look like...different in every teaching space around the country!)  I have to be sensible and change it bit by bit and mold it into a maths programme that I am happy with and is ensuring engagement and success for my learners.

Today we covered The Joys of Timetabling, Grouping, Planning for a Rich Task and Follow up Learning.  Structuring your maths week so you are fitting in workshops, oral language, rich tasks in flexible groupings and then some investigation tasks just seems to hit all the right targets for me.  

Moving forward I am going to continue to tweak my Task Board to include some more of the learning from today, mostly around the follow up tasks and basic facts resources that are available.  I will also move towards introducing a rich task and I like the idea of doing this on a Thursday because I could structure my workshops around the mathematical skills and strategies that could be useful to solve the problem.  Thank you to Sarah, who is on this journey with me, for suggesting that you could tell the group the problem and then the answer so it becomes about the best strategies to use to get to the answer, rather than the fastest person to solve the problem.  I am hoping that the injection of real contexts, rich tasks, more talking and investigations will switch my learners from feeling ok about maths to thinking it is pretty cool!

Right, I am signing off for now and will be checking out the resources above to create a Rich Task to share for homework:)

Know our learners as mathematicians

Day 2 of the Maths Practice Intensive was all about knowing our learners as mathematicians.  I have to keep reminding myself that it is called 'Intensive' for a particular reason!  We work through a lot of material in a relatively short space of time but I know that I will digest and revisit over the next three weeks before our next session and it will all start to sink in and make sense as more and more of the course is delivered to us.  One of my big take-aways is the fact that I am being delivered all of this research based material and I can pick and choose as to what will suit me and my class at this point.  Speaking of which, how fantastic do these slides look?  I am very keen to be working towards my planning for my students to be as enticing and interesting as the examples that we are having shared with us.

If this is the learning that they are being invited to be part of, then I will easily be motivating my learners to engage with the curriculum, know what their next steps are and to negotiate with them the best ways for them to reach these goals.

The wealth of knowledge we have at our fingertips through the assessment that we do is waiting and ready for us to use.  We just need some knowledge on how to use this.  Today we started creating our own Teacher Workbooks which will become a collection of data, next steps, learning intentions, and resource ideas.  This will be one of the areas where I will need to look at what works for me and build onto this as and when needed. 

I am off to have a go at creating a task board that I can start using tomorrow.  I think I need another long weekend...😄😄

What kind of mathematician are you?

As part of the MPI first day homework I got each of my Year 5 and 6 students to carry out a survey on a variety of questions about their attitude towards maths.  It was a quick and easy activity to carry out but has brought a wealth of information about their attitude to maths out in the open for us to work on.

My initial thought is that I need to think really hard about how I am presenting the maths curriculum to my students to ensure I can move some of my students' attitudes towards things like how confident they are, how often they get to discuss their ideas and strategies, what really helps them learn and how often they feel like they are getting feedback from me.

The question about how often they practice maths at home was very interesting and it was the question which saw most of the students rate themselves on the lower end of the scale.  I do wonder if they know that maths can be other things than just online apps etc.  I need to revisit the first blog post I wrote after my first MPI Day and look at what connections I can start making between maths topics and concepts, and also between maths and everyday life.

A question we are debating is if we find maths a bit challenging can we still like it?  We will keep you updated with what we decide.😃