Rebecca, a Teacher at a Primary School in Walsall Describes a Key Meeting with a Mathematics

Rebecca, a teacher at a primary school in Walsall describes a key meeting with a Mathematics specialist that helped her introduce new ways to approach problem solving in year 6.

I have been teaching for just over six years now and I openly admit that mathematics is not my strong point. I am a literacy specialist who has spent many hours developing new strategies and supporting colleagues with all things English. This year I was placed in year six with a top set which includes a number of pupils who are gifted and talented mathematically.

Since September the school has been implementing the new Numeracy Framework. It has taken a lot of hard work from all staff but slowly we are beginning to make a dent in our planning and our new understanding. As primary teachers are probably aware the new framework is split into blocks and problem solving plays a big part in nearly all of them.

I spent an afternoon with a mathematics specialist on our staff to try and get my head around problem solving and how I could develop ideas for those G&T pupils. He introduced me to a fabulous website www.nrich.maths.org. This website became the basis to a lot of my problem solving teaching.

I introduced the pupils to the idea of problem solving using concept cartoons (see John Dabell’s blog on the NCETM site Talking the talk with concept cartoons in maths ). They were given a small comic strip with a range of different conversations some with convincing arguments others very vague and often incorrect. Concept Cartoons :: Maths Concept Cartoon Example The pupils then worked in small groups discussing the different ideas and what they believed to incorrect or just imprecise. They were then able to relay back to the whole class things that they had noticed and ways that they found useful.

One of these comic strips was based around a problem found on the nrich website. The problem discussed how sheep talk (quite amusing for the pupils). Working through the problem in the new ways they had discussed resulted in them collating their results and producing a table. All pupils were able to take part in this and found different ways of organising their tables. The pupils then began to look for patterns, most children were able to identify a pattern through some of the columns and the G&T pupils began to notice if they structured their table in a specific way it would result in one column of their table following the Fibonacci rule.

The lesson was a complete success, even to the extent that two pupils began to explore ways in which their rules could be expressed using algebra.

The idea of concept cartoons has now inspired me to look at other ways they can be used within my mathematics teaching but also across the different areas of the curriculum. The children also thoroughly enjoy using the cartoons on the NCETM website and the corresponding links.

But above all, the discussions that I had had with this mathematics specialist made all the difference. After our initial discussion, I went away and create a number of resources involving concept cartons in problem solving and used them within my classroom. I then went back to the specialist and discussed what I had created and what the pupils had gained from the experience. I then adapted some of my resources further so that they could be used for other aspects of mathematics. Those conversations really transformed my understanding of how to reach G&T pupils in a whole class scenario.