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!

1 step forward, 2 steps back...

This is not nearly as negative as it sounds!  Really it's more of a reminder to me as the start of the school year looms.  I have to remember that my class this year will not be in the same headspace as the class that I just farewelled a scant 4 weeks ago.

I know that sounds like stating the obvious, but having spent some time in a school with a mixed age class that spanned 4 year groups it had become normal for me to pick up largely where I left off every January.  Changing jobs last year was different, because the whole situation was new to me, but this year I must keep reminding myself that these new children in my class are not only new to me, but new to the whole idea of self-direction.

I have kept a small number from last year and hope that they'll be the role models and leaders that the other need to have in front of them, but realistically I'm starting back at the beginning of the Maths Cafe journey once again.  And I have to keep that at the forefront of my awareness so that I don't get frustrated when self-management skills are not what I was used to at the end of last year, or some such hiccup in the smooth running of the Cafe.

This is not a criticism of the children, but just an awareness that it is all too easy for me to slip into habitual ways of thinking or behaving in class and I have to take time to build those foundations again in order to make progress through the year.

Maths Cafe will need modelling to them, slowly, clearly, methodically.  I will need to take some time to teach them the appetisers we use, to create some common understandings, games and activities that will carry us all through the year.  And I will need to remind the "old hands" that they too will need to exercise some patience as their new classmates build routines and confidence - just as they themselves did in February and March 2016.

I'm sure we'll be fine.  I'll let you know!