Mathematics

 

Launching Maths Workshop

This unit serves to launch Maths Workshop at the start of the year by creating a classroom culture built upon trust and respect. Students will be taught predictable classroom routines which will support learning across the year and help to build confidence and positive attitudes towards the subject. Students will learn the importance of a growth mindset alongside a recognition that mistakes are a part of the learning process. The tasks which students engage in during this unit will help them to see maths as a broad, interesting and visual subject that involves deep thinking.

Key questions:

• How can mistakes help people to learn?
• What makes someone a proficient mathematician?
• How do mathematicians communicate their thinking clearly to others?

One of the best ways of building numerical reasoning is through number talks and open-ended games. These are fun activities that develop mathematical thinking beyond a standard algorithm. This involves strengthening students' accuracy, efficiency and flexibility with mental mathematics and computation strategies. Going through a taught procedure and getting the right answer is one thing, but understanding why that answer is correct might be another, more challenging thing for some students. The games that we will introduce this unit and play throughout the year, build students' abilities to understand the relationships between numbers from every angle and to explain their own strategies to teachers and peers.

In this example, multiple strategies for subtraction are explored. They are all equally correct:




Students will be helped to understand that tricky problems that challenge us are a good thing, because struggling a bit makes us smarter and builds more learning. This is a growth mindset. Working together and sharing discoveries is fun!

Next unit... Place value and operations with whole numbers