3Maths gets started.
Our new maths group started on Monday. Nine Year 6 children who all find maths extremely difficult gathered in a spare room somewhere in the depths of Paganel Primary School.
And what was our first lesson? Place value perhaps? Something about column addition? Problem solving? Division?
No - it was none of those. The children all gathered around a conference table and talked with their teachers about:
- the kinds of things they found hard;
- the sort of things that made them happy or unhappy in maths;
- what areas they wanted to learn more of;
- how they wanted to organise their space and time.
Together we resolved to spend an extra homework session practising maths online, through the use of Google Docs or maybe web conferencing (if I can organise it). We also decided to reorganise the space in the room so there is a space for instruction and discussion around the whiteboards and a space for independent work at the back of the room. We resolved to have a go at the things they found hard, such as percentages, fractions and division. And we resolved to have fun with the things they found easy such as column addition and Pie Charts.
If you were there maybe you could leave a comment about what you're looking forward to doing in maths. And if you weren't there maybe you could leave a story of turning maths failure into success to encourage the students who feel like they have already experienced much failure in their maths learning.
