Articles

(first published in the SMC Journal Issue 48) In my last article, I shared what a fantastic resource metre sticks are for teaching early addition and subtraction skills. In this article I will highlight how they are also great for teaching fractions, decimal fractions and percentages in upper primary. Halves and mixed numbers Let’s assume your pupils already have a secure understanding of the idea that a fraction is part of a whole and are confident...

First published in the SMC Primary Journal Issue 1 (2017j Two years ago we bought 100 metre sticks.  Last year we bought 100 more! Used together with base ten materials, metre sticks are a great resource for teaching key numeracy skills. The ones we use have the multiples of ten and five written on them but have marks only (no numerals) for the numbers in-between. These partially numbered metre sticks can be difficult to find. We sourced...

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your class all working on a worksheet, textbook page, or other activity, checking in with each other regularly to mark their own work, discussing wrong answers and doing their own corrections? You, meanwhile, would be free to work with individuals or a small group, and at the end of the lesson you would get the other children’s work handed in already marked. Brilliant! What’s more, imagine if...

(first published in TES – July 2019) I walked into a colleague’s classroom some months ago and saw this above the board: “Mistakes are to be expected, respected, inspected and corrected.” Brilliant! This, in a nutshell, was what we had been trying to teach our children for years – that it is not just OK to make mistakes, but mistakes are actually where the learning happens. So don’t rub them out! Instead, value them and talk about them. I shared this mantra with...