Go slowly now, to go quickly later.

I've spent quite a lot of my "holiday" doing professional reading, and watching all those training videos that you just don't get time to do during the term (and those webinars that are held in USA timezones so you're usually in front of your class when they take place and they don't post replays!).  This is possibly why I always use the term "non-contact time" rather than 'holiday' once Christmas and New Year are done and dusted.

I've been lucky enough to come across a great website, run by Christina Tondevold, called Mathematically Minded  and she has put out 4 FREE training videos that are available until February 1st.  I've watched them all, and followed up the FREE downloads as well, and they are great! (link will be at the bottom of this post)

Now, these videos are aimed at students who are pre-school, NE, Y1 and Y2.... an area of the school that I really don't spend much time in.  So why did I dedicate around 4 hours of my non-contact time to it, I hear you ask.

The answer is simple.  These videos deal with number sense, which as Christina says many times is "not taught, but caught", and which seems to have been not caught by a great many students that I see coming through into Y5 and Y6.  You know the ones.

• They may be able to solve an algorithm, but not if the number is bigger than 100.  
• They may be able to recite a times table, but have no idea how to use that information in their work. 
• They are the ones who hate maths, who may act out during a lesson to get out of doing any work, and whose first and last strategy is to count on their fingers - even when they're subtracting 52 from 76.
• They may have been through intervention programmes such as ALiM on more than one occasion.

At least one of these students has featured in every single class I've ever taught, and I'm sure it's no different for you.  And I'm not early years trained, so my initial training as a teacher of mathematics was aimed at 7 - 12 year olds and was based on the assumption that they would already have this slightly elusive thing known as number sense.

So I watched these videos and mind-mapped the things that I felt I might need reminding of during this term.

Early number concepts

Basic number relationships

Implementation tips

  And there are three big things I must remember when I step back into the classroom next week:

1. Number sense is built through experiences, caught not taught - so giving plenty of experiences to those students who need to build their number sense is more important at the beginning than lots of teacher workshops.
2. Go slowly at first in order to go quickly later - take the necessary time for the students to have their lightbulb moment.  If you rush through those experiences at the beginning, then you still will have achieved nothing because everybody develops number sense at their own pace as they process their own experiences.  If you enforce your pace, then your students still may not have developed their number sense.  Remember you teach students not a curriculum.
3. You can guide students' experiences to lead them towards the understandings that you want them to have, but you cannot force those understandings upon them.

There are lots of tips, activities and helpful hints in these videos. I hope you can find time to enjoy them before they are taken down next week - they're well worth the investment of your time.

And I think I may be changing my laptop screensaver to a bold, vivid reminder:
GO SLOW NOW SO YOU CAN GO QUICKLY LATER.

Here's the link to the videos:
https://mathematicallyminded.leadpages.co/ns-free-video2-sp17-with-download/
Enjoy!