I  started be asking them three questions:

Q1: What did you learn from the assessment interviews?

A:

• We can underestimate the ability of children
• It highlighted areas of difficulty and suggested why they were struggling
• Took a lot of time
• numbers across the decades are tricky
• It highlighted the discrepancy between verbal and written maths
• Children rely too much on their teacher’s approval
• There is a lot more to early numeracy than level A would indicate.

Q: How have your lessons changed?

A:

• More Practical
• I take more time reinforce and consolidate skills
• Extending children knowledge - always challenging them for more
• Getting children to explain their strategies
• Much more self assessment
• More counting (especially counting back)
• Faster Pace
• More active learning
• Asking for alternative strategies (”Can you show me a different way?”, “Prove it!) 

Q: What are the advantages and challenges of MR Tracker ?

A:

Forward Planner:

Daily/weekly Planner:

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Count Me In Too is a project operating across New South Wales, Australia. It is designed to assist teachers broaden their knowledge of how children learn mathematics by focusing on the strategies students use to solve arithmetic tasks.

The project aims to improve the educational outcomes in mathematics for all students through professional development of teachers. It achieves this by increasing teachers’ understanding of how children develop increasingly sophisticated ways of solving arithmetical problems. The research-based learning framework used in the project provides direction for teaching and learning.

•Plan daily - include 4-6 progression activities

•Consider and hypothesise about the current ways of thinking based on an initial interview or early lessons (OBSERVATIONS)

•Test your hypothesis by posing tasks and closely observe response

•Modify your hypotheses if necessary and continue the cycle

•Monitor children’s willingness to tackle the problem and how comfortable they are

•With practice and reflection teachers can learn to adjust in subtle and important ways the pace, difficulty and challenge in the tasks.

•Tailor the teaching as closely as possible to the initial and ongoing assessment. It should be at the cutting edge of children’s knowledge (ZPD)

•Activities should continually challenge with the aim to bring about reorganisations in the child’s thinking and the development of more sophisticated strategies.

•Use the skills of wait time, repeating, reposing and probing responses which you learned in the assessment phase.

Click here to go to this part of the site

This was our PowerPoint for Numeracy:

My next endeavour is to add some video clips of MR Tracker Interviews. These can be found by clicking on the MR Tracker tab at the top and then clicking on the subpages - Observations. I hope that these prove useful to those teacher who have had MR Tracker input but would like more opportunities to practise observing children solving the tasks. Again teachers could  post comments about these if they would like to start a discussion about any of the progressions.

Adding the video clips is proving time consuming. Hopefully I will have this part of the site complete over the next few weeks.

This is how she structured her lesson:

Learning Intention - adding two groups together 

Warm up

• Number Word Sequences:
  • “Clap, Clap, Pat, Pat” 
    • Teacher says first two numbers of a number word sequence on Clap, Clap
    • Children say the next two number in the sequence on Pat, Pat
    • Teacher asks if the sequence was forwards or backwards (links forwards to adding and backwards to subtraction)
    • Challenges children to say number word after
    • Helen throws in some challenging numbers sequences and lets all children have a go 
• Finger Patterns:
  • “Bunny Ears”
    • Children put hands in “bunny ears position”
    • Teacher asks the children to put a quantity on each hand
    • Teacher asks how many altogether.
    • Teacher supports those children who need support by directing them to look at someone elses ‘ears’ (this changes the task from a screened task to a visual task)
    • Teacher then invites the children to check their answer
      • Key questions to challenge thinking: How do you know? Can you prove it another way? Can you make that number a different way?
• Domino Patterns
  • “Domino Add”
    • Helen show the children a domino on the interactive whiteboard and challenges the children find out how many dots their are altogether.
    • Children are encouraged to use a range of strategies to solve the problem
    • Children check the answer by counting and highlighting the spots.
      • Key questions to challenge thinking: How did you know how many spots there were? Prove it a different way?
      • Techniques to challenge thinking: flashing the domino initially  (screened task) hiding half of the domino (partially screened task)
• Numerals
  • No formal teaching of numeral sequences this day (Helen does use washing line numerals)
  • Children were provided with whiteboards and pens to write down numerals/ sums depending on their ability.

 Problem Solving Task:

• Adding two collections together
  • Children are grouped by ability.
  • They each have an adding task targeting their development needs
  • Some tasks are visual, others are partially screened to challenge more sophisticated strategies (Helen leads this group to ensure she challenges thinking)
    • Children can all be given the same challenge but this can be differentiated by providing the challenge visually, partially screened or fully screened. We discussed using clear and opaque screens/boxes so the children all had the same equipment (the clear screen/box would allow for visual counting)
    • 2 clear boxes- visual
    • 1 clear & 1 opaque - partially screened
    • 2 opaque - fully screened

Plenary

• How did you get on?
• How did you solve the task?
  • This is a good time for pupils to demonstrate their strategies.

 This is an excellent example. Helen linked all her progressions together. The warm up introduced/practised the key skills that were required to do the problem solving activity. The problem solving activity was simple and therefore children were working independently and on-task. Helen made sure that she used her time to challenge children’s thinking by introducing screens.

Thanks Helen!

One solution is using learning assistants to effect: providing them with some training in the MR strategies so that they can be directed to groups within a lesson to practise skills (warm up), support problem solving and challenge thinking.

This is exactly what Longniddry are trying to do. The Learning Assistants had their first taste of Maths Recovery today. We looked at Number Word Sequences and looked at common errors and ways of supporting this. We also had a go at bunny ears (a fun ‘game’ that uses finger patterns to combine and partition numbers). The group  reported that they now felt confident delivering these activities under the class teachers instruction - fantastic!