Be creative with maths

Numeracy is an essential part of the curriculum – and one of the first concerns of any Ofsted inspector. It is all too easy to fall into the lessons-by-rote trap when teaching maths, simply because there are so many required elements to be covered throughout the year. A steady diet of worksheets can be the quickest way to boredom on everyone’s part – and bored children soon start playing up. Always being on the lookout for new ideas and being willing to try them out helps stop lessons and teachers from becoming stale.

When seeking to improve maths teaching and numeracy sessions schools should begin by identifying exactly what they want to achieve. A thorough curriculum audit is essential. Linking with partner schools or joining a Learning Network to share experiences and ideas can help to identify common problems and often produces innovative solutions. Being aware of the huge range of material available to assist you is essential.

Take advantage of any training courses on offer from local authorities or from specialist organisations such as Beam Educational which can tailor its maths programmes to individual schools. One school, for example, sought help in trying to identify where children were having problems and how to deal with them. Beam held a whole-day Inset for teachers and teaching assistants where they looked at how to use equipment, models and images to support learning.  Effective use of the interactive whiteboard was explored followed by methods of diagnosing children’s mis- and part-conceptions.

Teachers were then left to try out a range of materials and concepts with the children to see what was happening in the classroom. Having identified the children’s mis- and part-conceptions, a final visit looked at which specific materials and methods should be used.

Weaknesses in maths teaching can appear in the most unexpected areas. Robin Ings, primary mathematics adviser at Norfolk County Council, commented: ‘It is usually specific bits of subject which need looking at. Calculation is always a problem and we found we had to teach teachers how to use calculators. Many did not know how to use the memory button.’

Making it relevant
Children will remember the innovative and interesting ways in which a subject is presented. If it is interesting they are more likely to understand it. Look at ways in which maths can be shown to be useful rather than just an abstract subject that has to be covered each day. Children are more willing to learn if the material is presented in a relevant fashion. Showing maths in action is guaranteed to get their attention. Ticktock has launched a series of books entitled Using Maths. There are three levels – green (KS1); blue (KS2) and red (KS2 but having more difficult problems). In the green level pupils have to collect data from given information such as ‘Firefighters to the Rescue’ and then use their maths skills to solve problems. In ‘Zookeeper’ children study food deliveries and how much trucks can carry, snake length, penguin sizes and creating charts.

At the blue and red level; pupils are placed in role-play situations such as flying jumbo jets, extreme sports, designing roller-coasters or skyscrapers. Real-life data are used to solve problems faced by experts such as racing drivers or mission control scientists. For example in ‘Win a Grand Prix’, one challenge involves assessment of fuel requirements at pit stops. While in ‘Design a Roller Coaster’ there is a task involving estimating how much track is needed using the perimeter of polygons. Two answers are needed. Then there is a follow-up challenge question based on those answers where the child has to discover how long each loop would be, if the length of each loop was exactly half way between the two original answers. Other topics involve studying coordinates, the placing of roller-coasters and creating designs.

Publishing director Ruth Owen comments: ‘Teachers have been delighted and excited by these series. They feel they are unique. The approach and the presentation are ideal for a wide range of ages. Red level has even been used with teenagers. Kids are enjoying them as they present problems which can be relevant to ordinary life.’

On a simpler basis, children can set up a play post office or shop and practise skills of buying, selling and using coins with all the attendant mathematical skills.

Board games
Board games should not be forgotten. Entertaining and guaranteed to appeal to everyone; they provide invaluable ways of practising basic calculations and mental arithmetic. Beam Education produce a series of number challenge games, which involve children helping Vikings juggle coins or rescuing climbers trapped on a mountainside. Even more challenging is ‘Mission Impossible’, which provides practise on problem solving, measuring, shape and space with questions that can be tackled individually or in groups.

Anecdotal evidence among teachers indicates that playing Scrabble helps both literacy and numeracy. Children who struggle with basic maths and English have been found to benefit from the multi-tasking found in a Scrabble game. It helps to change the focus of the game regularly – sometimes length of words, sometimes scores.

Cross-curricular links
Developing cross-curricular links is a painless way of teaching and learning maths. Many schools are running special maths labs, fun days and maths weeks which seek to give new insights into the subject by highlighting its applications across the curriculum. The idea is to devote an entire timetable to maths, but in an innovative way. Such projects require considerable preparation and decisions need to be made at an early stage whether it is to involve an entire year group, a group of classes or even the entire school. The project is introduced by a staff meeting during which a theme is chosen – it might be architecture, buildings, flight, exercise, and space. Develop lots of ideas on how maths could be used in other subject areas. Maths at home for example might include making plans of bedrooms, designing an ideal home and what it would be like to live there. How do homes today differ from homes in the past? What are the sizes and room proportions? What type of homes do animals live in? June Loewenstein’s book Maths All Week, costing £27.50 from Beam Educational, is a wonderful source of ideas, themes and information. 

Individual year groups may do slightly different subjects but involve children from other classes or in some cases year groups. Arden Grove First School in Norwich ran a maths fun day, which involved Year 1 doing work on money and shopping while Year 2 studied patterns. Each year group involved two classes with about eight activities to complete during the day. Children had to work with a partner from the other class in their year group and could travel between rooms, but could not abandon their partner. This enabled children of differing abilities to help each other.

Involvement across year groups requires more organisation. A beanbag challenge might involve Reception children having to hit a PE marker with a beanbag while an older child had the task of keeping track of the number of hits. While at Arden Grove Year 3 children were given the task of setting up an orienteering course round the school field. This involved measuring tasks, plotting the course and designing markers with maths problems to solve at each point. The Year 3 children then partnered Year 1 children to guide them round the course.

Resources need not be extensive for projects of this kind. Maths trails can be devised around the school or in nearby streets looking for shapes, dates, numbers, counting different types of cars in a car park or working out simple sums. Looking at patterns could lead to the creation of kaleidoscopes, investigate patterns on rugs, tie-dying or making maths hats. Help from local businesses and organisations may be possible. Local restaurants may be willing to work with children showing how food is prepared and menus costed. Then the children have to create and cost their own. Fire stations can provide information on call out numbers and vehicle running costs while garden centres can provide information on tree and plant heights to help design gardens. Visiting a church can provide lots of information on patterns, counting and finding out how buildings are put together; showing maths in action.

At Ysgol Frongoch, a primary school in north Wales, teacher David Baugh organised a school trip in which children visited a quarry. The aim was to study the impact of humanity on the environment. When they returned to school, the class created a spreadsheet showing their findings.

Thinking laterally about how maths can be applied to ordinary life immediately starts introducing lots of ideas for lessons. There are lots of measuring activities, which can be undertaken around school buildings while artists frequently incorporate maths concepts into their work such as shapes and perspective. Study the history of measuring and how it relates to body measurement. Make books on numbers, find out which letters appear most frequently on a page and why are some books read from left to right or right to left or even back to front.

Finally, make the maths week special by ensuring that children share what they have done with other children perhaps by doing a presentation during assembly, or putting on a display in the school hall.

Teaching assistants play an important role in any maths teaching but it is important that they are properly prepared and aware of exactly what the subject matter is beforehand. Teaching assistants can be used very effectively by the teacher to provide additional help to children who have difficulty in understanding a concept. Simply going over the subject on a one-to-one basis may be sufficient to help the child grasp the mathematical concept being introduced. Alternatively, teaching assistants can be used to help with extension exercises and tasks for able children who master the subject matter quickly and need something else to work on. If these children are not given additional work, they quickly become bored and this can cause trouble within the classroom. Teachers need to ensure that there is sufficient extra material available in every session to cater for the needs of such able children. 

Website resources
There are websites available offering lots of useful material, particularly for providing tasks for more able children. The Mathematics Enrichment project from the University of Cambridge is a very valuable resource. It provides thousands of free resources, which are designed to develop subject content knowledge and problem solving and thinking skills at each key stage. Content changes each month; for example, in September the focus was on numbers. Typical questions involved ‘Alien Counting’ in which the aliens count in different ways depending on how many fingers they have. Tasks involve finding numbers that the aliens used to count children in a classroom which look the same to humans. Another useful site is Primary Resources, which contains lots of useful ideas provided by practising teachers. Information and tasks from the site can be used freely in classrooms or for homework tasks. Typical maths activities include problem solving, investigations, handling data, numbers and the number system, calculations.

Angela Youngman is a teacher and freelance writer.