Ideas and links to support the teaching of Maths Mastery
A recent blog on the Secret Headteacher website highlighted 17 Maths Warm Up games.
It’s very handy to have such a great list readily available to fill those extra few minutes at the end of the day or before lunch.
I really like the addition of Parking Panic to aid the development of visual logical thinking.
MathsBot is a recent discovery of mine which has a few great tools aimed at older maths learners – on loading, it displays resources for GCSE pupils, for example.
However, it also has a section of online manipulatives which are great to use in the Primary classroom – particularly one which may be lacking somewhat in concrete resources.
Now, I know that online and virtual pictorial representations are no substitute for
Right now, there are 12 available:
Of those, a handy way to create place value counters and Dienes blocks, will prove invaluable to me.
Numberblocks is a pre-school BBC television series aimed at introducing children to
These NCETM materials use each episode as a launch pad. They are designed to assist Early Years (and also Year 1) practitioners to move on from an episode, helping children to bring the numbers and ideas to life in the world around them.
You don’t even need to register with the NCETM to use them!
The materials are designed to be used in conjunction with the
Overviews of each series, their storylines and the mathematics addressed, are available as downloadable PDFs from the link below.
More materials are available on the CBeebies’ Numberblocks page, also linked below.
I have long been a fan of Steve Wyborney’s blog where he shares plenty of engaging and different ideas to develop mathematical thinking. Although based in Oregon, the ideas are still very relevant to the UK curriculum.
I recently came across his use of dot patterns to promote ‘noticing’ – not something we necessarily spend a lot of time on, but I now wonder why we don’t.
One big focus in mathematics teaching currently is the use of small step and space to let children think. This sort of activity undoubtedly lends itself towards these ideas.
Steve has created 10 pages of dotted patterns, the purpose of which is to promote a wide variety of partitioning, seeking different perspectives and recording observations in ways that can be very useful. I would guarantee there will be children in every class who see a different pattern or way of breaking things up to draw out different mathematics every time.
He recommends using 18 copies of the same pattern with the space underneath being vital to allow plenty of working room and many opportunities to explore the same thing in different ways.
The following image is from his explanation video of how to use the patterns (found here), demonstrating 4 ways to investigate one such pattern.
For a greater challenge, once children are used to working with these, you could develop more complex images with different coloured dots – each colour being worth a separate value – to explore larger numbers, perhaps. Each dot doesn’t need to necessarily only be worth 1, either.
The 10 patterns and some further information can be found at the link below.
This lovely animated GIF makes me feel like there is something worth getting children to investigate further – either as a lesson activity
As always, I’d love to hear if you use the idea, or it has inspired you to do something different in a lesson.
