Anyone who knows me well will tell you I am crap at maths. I struggled to get my o level and it wasn't an excellent grade, but I just about passed. As the years go by I am gradually getting better but I still struggle to understand what I am doing - personally I think I have a phobia with numbers.
The curriculum allows children to try a variety of methods to add and subtract, multiply and divide numbers. The idea behind this is that a child will find a method that they are comfortable with and use it - unlike when I was at school where you were shown one way of doing things. For the most part most children do find this beneficial though as a parent I often am faced with children's homework and find that the method they are using is alien to me. Some children however need to be told just one way otherwise they get confused easily - I am sure I would be one of those children!
Today I took some children from our school to another one in the area where they were holding a maths day. Like me they were apprehensive at the thought of doing maths all day, and were not looking forward to it. However the day turned out better than they thought. There were lots of maths board games to play and they could also construct things using Knex- the idea being that what they constructed had to hold a tin of beans and go down a slope without dropping it. Some of the games required you to use your number facts, some mental arithmetic and some you needed to think really hard about and plan ahead, as you would in a game of draughts or chess. The children had fun, and so did I, made all the better that the bloke who was in charge was quite dishy and needed my help (yes he singled me out but think that was because he confused me with someone else
but who am I to complain), and the day turned out better than expected.
I brought back with me a few ideas that we could use in lessons and fed this back to the numeracy co-ordinator in school. Whether anything will be done about it or not is another matter, but I have always maintained that there is no longer enough play in lessons in primary schools as the curriculum is far too structured and children don't get to develop their skills. There seems to be an increase in children that need to have more knetic stimulation in class to learn and playing games is one way of doing this and I do think that one lesson a week could be set aside for children to play games of this sort. Afterall far too many children are coming into schools nowadays having no idea how to play or socialise.
Oh well off my soapbox now and off to make a cup of tea.