Making the Right Choices, at the Right Time, for the Right Kids.

For this week’s blog I’m going to talk about how we, as teachers, manage to do the right activities for the right group of kids at the right time. And ultimately, how that isn’t possible all the time!

I finished my last blog outlining the CPD I intend to do in a school to support mental calculation strategies (if you haven’t read it, go back and read that first! Only joking, that abstract is all the prior knowledge you need!). The list was easy enough to generate; I looked back at my previous work, activities and ideas that support mental calculation and wrote them all down. One of them – Starting From – was at the top of my list.

The premise of Starting From is, as the name suggests, a game that always starts from a set number – in Y2, it might be 24; Y3, 624 or even a decimal; Y4, 4.7 and so on. I ask a question related to that number – multiply by ten, add 100, subtract 10 - and children answer either orally or on whiteboards (there is a worksheet version as well which a school asked for many years ago!). It works well for mental calculation because you control the amount of time available to calculate their answers, so I don’t give them enough time to do a written method. The children learn strategies from each other through peer explanation and modelling or through explicit teaching. Either way, it is teaching you can target because you instantly see any misconceptions.

After writing my CPD plan I thought I would try it out at a school I work at regularly, doing it over a couple of sessions ( I only do 30 minutes with each class and have other activities that I want to fit in) as the first session is inevitably filled with children who forget that we start from the number on the board and work from the answer they just generated! After the first session, I realised something astonishing.

That astonishing realisation was that I hadn’t played the game Starting From in over six years. The fact stunned me. How could I not have used it? In that time, I was a Y6 teacher, a Y2 teacher and then, post COVID, a maths specialist. That’s a lot of maths lessons - surely it would have been useful for those kids! Of course it would, it is an effective, quick activity (after initial pupil training anyway!) which really does support quick mental calculation (as well as a brilliant ‘in the moment’ assessment tool). So why had I not used it in so long, when I knew how useful it is? The answer is simple, I forgot.

Oh, how easy it is to forget as a teacher! To forget the things that work well one year because the maths scheme changes or you change year group, or change school, or have a baby (I had a baby in 2018; I’m blaming the baby!). It happens so easily. How often have you been on a course - and not one of the rubbish ones where you’re just killing time, enjoying a day out of class and a free lunch – one of the ones that’s full of interesting, useful ideas, activities and methods, but you’ve not been able to retain everything they talked about or suggested? I know I have; I’ve found notebooks full of scribings and thought, ‘Oh, I never did try that!’ It is hard. It’s hard for me and I only teach one subject!

So how do we ensure that we remember the things that work well? How do we make life easier for ourselves by having a plan that doesn’t need to be changed? When I was a class teacher full time, I had a rule when I went on courses: when it had finished and everyone gleefully ran out because they’d finished 17 minutes earlier than normal, I stayed for 5 minutes to write down two things that I would do in class. Two things to try, either the next day or that week. I always thought it harsh, as sometimes training was chock full of great ideas but how do you remember it all? I murdered my darlings early. Just choosing two meant that I could try and implement those things well instead of doing nine things quite poorly. And it seemed to serve me well….

… Until Monday.

Six years. That’s almost an entire primary school career!

However, after doing it again, I remembered how good Starting From is. It starts slow as you get children used to working quickly, and ensuring everyone is taking part but once they’ve got the principles it works well. Especially when children want to explain their method.

I particularly like it for teaching strategies of adding 9 (adding 10 and subtracting 1), then extending to adding 90, 99 and 900. The same is done for subtracting. When multiplying by ten you can instantly see who hasn’t quite got it because they’ve just added a zero, usually in the wrong place, or after a decimal point. I’ll be using it again, frequently. And, hopefully, this time, I won’t forget.

Thank you for taking the time to read. How do you ensure you don’t forget the things that work well? How does it work when you change year group? Change schools? Or when you get a new teaching scheme for a particular subject? Please share by using the comments below, tag us on social media, or send us an email. We’d love to hear your thoughts.