#primary maths

I’ve used several maths schemes of work over the years and thought I’d make a summary post of them here, incase anyone was interested! Although planning your own maths lessons from scratch forms the basis of your maths planning/teaching during your teacher training, after you qualify there’s a wealth of supportive schemes to help with coverage and depth in maths teaching and learning.

Hamilton Trust

I’ve used both year 1-2 maths plans and year 2/3 maths planning from Hamilton Trust which provides lots of resources/worksheets for every lesson and does cover the entire curriculum over the course of the year. They are great for maths fluency and have some good activities to get children fluent in maths skills.

My main issues with using Hamilton plans though are that occassionally the content for mixed year planning doesn’t match up, so it feels like you are teaching 2 different lessons! (Especially with the cross key stage year 2/3 plans…) Also their plans aren’t that great for showing verbal reasoning or problem solving, key areas in the new curriculum especially in reagrds to greater depth in mathematics. Also although some sample plans are free, Hamilton Trust is a subscription service (albeit a reasonably priced one).

White Rose Maths Hub

White Rose have just updated their scheme for the 2017-18 year and they are now so much better than before! Lots of key information that covers all curriculum objectives complete with specifc questions that relate to fluency, verbal reasoning and problem solving for each key objective (which this time also includes the answers, yay).

White Rose provides enough to get you started, but it isn’t a full planning scheme with lessons. However, it is a great starting point and I often use their example fluency, verbal reasoning and problem solving questions to assess my class’s ability at the end of a block.

AET Maths

AET provide very detailed medium term plans and links to some great resources for maths from reception to GCSE level! Each topic is broken down into micro steps for children to learn and gives advice in how teachers could teach each topic. Best of all for me, this scheme has blocks of lesson objectives that match up when teaching a mixed age class, hooray!

Downsides of AET are that you have to sift through the wealth of information to find what you really need and there are few lesson by lesson type plans availible for free.

Twinkl Plan-it

I finally bought Twinkl with a Planit subscription included this year and I have not regretted it! Their plan-it lessons (especially for maths) are well crafted, follow the objectives and give you between 2 and 6 lesson plans and complete kit of resources for every learning objective in the primary national curriculum! Lots of the activities are really quite inventive, and my class have really enjoyed the ones I have given to them so far (the number hunting one we did last week went down an absolute treat!)

Only downsides of Planit really are the cost (£70 upfront for a years subscription), but it’s only the third week of term and twinkl have already saved me hours, so the scheme is worth its weight in gold really.

Other schemes

Other schemes I have used briefly or heard about are Rising Stars, Abacus, Singapore Maths and Big Maths. I’ve used Rising Stars maths assessments which were okay, but very narrowly focused and I’ve used Big Maths weekly “Beat That” tests which are good, but a little repetitive.

This year with my new bunch of year 2/3s, I’m using AET maths medium term plans, with some twinkl planit lessons for a bit of variety/fun and White Rose questions to help the kids get to greater depth. I’ll let you know if this mix works!

Here are some handy websites and links for free maths resources for primary teaching. I’ve used quite a few of these, but some are new to me and I will certainly be getting stuck into them!

KS1 maths exemplification  - This link is for working at expected level, some good ideas for activities to do to reach each criteria of the curriculum.

Nrich.maths.org - Good for maths mastery questions.

NCETM.org - National centre for excellence in teaching mathmatics.

Mathsphere.co.uk - a good range of simple sample worksheets on offer for free.

Schofield and Sims - (You have to buy their books, but they provide lots of free resources too).

TES - annoyingly, lots of the best resources are now behind a paywall, BUT there are still lots of planning gems and great resources available for free.

Twinkl.com - they’ve got some great maths challenge cards and other maths worksheets, most of them free, but even the monthly subscription isn’t much considering how much you get access to!

Topmarks.co.uk - A great range of free games and whiteboard activites to use with your class.

Primaryresources.co.uk - Lots of these are quite old now/follow the pre-2014 curriculum, but they’re all still free of charge!

Snappymaths.com - site is a bit fiddly to navigate, but has some good resources covering the whole maths curriculum.

Maths Mastery Area

One of my classroom success stories this year has been my maths mastery area of the classroom! It’s a place where children can go to when they’ve finished their set maths work and complete extension tasks (for coverted house points of course!)

I’ve set up whiteboards and squared paper for children’s jottings, and cubes and number squares to help them scafold their learning. The aim of the area is really to further their thinking (independently) and to provide some evidencefor that elusive “greater depth” on the key stage 1/2 assessment by setting tasks that require verbal reasoning as well as mathmatical number sense.

There are also some group games (times tables, time, fractions etc) that children can play together to consolidate their learning if a whole group of children complete the lesson work at once. It certainly helps if children find a lesson straightforward or timetable changes mean there’s no time for a formal lesson and challenge cards can be bought out and worked on.

My kids like the choice of challenge cards, which I try and change every 2-3 weeks (and if I’m really organised, whenever we change topic!) and many of my high flyers try to complete the whole basket of cards!

I rediscovered a resource for teaching fractions this week (as year 2s need to be able to add fractions and find equivalents these days...)

It’s an interactive fraction wall where you can show or hide fractions, find equivalents and even look at lowest common multiples! It works well on an interactive whiteboard and is very simple and clear to use when teaching fractions to any year group (it certainly saves drawing wobbly fraction bars on a whiteboard!)

Medium term plans | Lesson planning | Maths lessons | Literacy lessons

Time for some maths planning tips! Hopefully this helps you get an idea about how to plan and structure a maths lesson within a series of lessons :)

1) Like general lesson planing, its important to get your learning objective and success criteria for the lesson ready first. These again will come from your medium term plans which are heavily structured based on national curriculum content, so there is less room for going off topic. As maths and literacy are lessons which are completed daily in school, it is likely you will have a weekly maths plan, covering a set topic or part of a topic. Breaking this subtopic down into 5 lessons to be taught during the week is the first thing to do!

2) Here’s an example of the weekly overview maths planning for a KS1 class. As you can see not a great deal is covered during the week, but each lesson builds on the child’s existing knowledge and extends their learning slowly. A KS2 weekly plan would cover nearly twice as much content in a week, encouraging a breadth of knowledge and more time to practice the complex skills being learnt.

3) After dividing your subtopic into a week’s worth of lessons, time to plan each individual lesson. This follows a similar structure to the general lesson planning, of an introduction, main teaching activity, independent activity and plenary. However, your introduction to the lesson should be an oral and mental starter activity to get children’s brains in gear and prepared for the mental mathematics and calculations they will be doing in the lesson. The lesson plan below is the 4th out of a series of 5 lessons on money, subtraction and change.

4) I like to use whiteboards for the oral/mental starter so that all the children are participating and using their brains. It’s really important to make sure all children can participate in the starter activity regardless of ability, and only minor differentiation should be used if at all as all the pupils can clearly see which members of the class are doing different levels of work. I use lots of online games for starter activities including topmarks, topmarks whiteboard, multipication.com and bbc bitesize. In the lesson below, I allow the children to think of as many number bonds to 20, which will help them with the number problems in the following lesson.

5) The plans for maths lessons go into a bit more detail than foundation subject lessons as often each step of a calculation has to be worked in a slow, methodical way for the children to understand how to work things out themselves. Scaffolding the children’s learning of mathematical concepts can sometimes be trickier than you think and it’s worth writing out in your plan exactly how you are going to talk the class through a concept. Asking the children to have a go at some simpler versions of the problem and show their answers on whiteboards/number fans/flash cards works well as you can then tailor the pace of your lesson to suit the class and see where/who is having difficulties.

6) There are usually more ability groups in maths lessons than any other lesson as children often find it hard to complete activities with larger numbers they have less experience with, whilst others relish the challenge of using the biggest numbers in their calculations! In this plan, I have 5 differentiated groups, with all children completing calculations (giving change from different amounts) that will challenge them.

7) The plenary for a maths lesson should be more substantial than a foundation lesson and recap the learning that has taken place as well as address any misconceptions that have arisen during the lesson. Occasionally it is appropriate to get the children to come up and show the class how to go through a problem independently on the whiteboard, but at other times it is better to gauge how much the children have taken in by paying some sort of game or doing a quiz where everyone can participate - this also helps your future planning/tweaking of the next lesson!

8) As always, evaluating how the lesson went, what the children learned and what issues need to be addressed next lesson. Most of the time maths work is quick to mark, which helps you evaluate how things went before the next lesson!