Spring Into Maths Reflection...

After our first few weeks of moving Spring Into Maths from a withdrawal group to an in-class programme, my target group are all excited for Maths lessons. By taking time to step back and observe I have noticed these usually quiet students who shy away from sharing their ideas, are now confidently interacting with each other, and appear keen to share their thinking. Actively engaged is not a phrase I would have used many times when talking about this group, but if I was asked to describe their learning today it would have been exactly what I would have said!

Possible reasons for this change in confidence could be linked to: 

• opportunities to strengthen visual connections to the learning through use of materials
• the 'fun' element of maths games
• the small group size
• aligned ability levels has evened the playing field - no one is viewed as the 'expert' so everyone is willing to share their thinking
• following the SPRING format allows for opportunities to revisit learning using different numbers 
• the learning is pitched at the right level
• teacher/teacher aid shared language of instruction
• teacher/teacher aid enthusiasm
• increased self efficacy

After the lesson today I asked two of my target students to work collaboratively to write a description of their learning for this blog post. Their description of today's learning written by students G2 and G5 is below. 

'Spring into Maths is a group that develops and practises basic facts and gives students in the group an opportunity to understand the maths that is hidden in the questions for example - What is ⅛ of 24=?- This question is very similar to multiplication but instead we use the opposite strategy which is division. Today, the Spring into Maths group played a few games that involved addition, place value, and multiplication. We wrote down numbers on the white board and used the place value strategy to help find out the answer. Our warm up  energizer was using the biggest to smallest strategy to sort the number cards out. Next we played maths game to practise our times tables which was called Digi Facts. After that we used the place value house to clarify our understanding of numbers using thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones. Here is an example using the number 689 -600 is the hundreds, 80 is the tens, 9 is the ones. We got all ours right!

We like Spring into Maths because it helps us improve on the areas we need to work on in fun ways. All of us are confident to share our answers because everyone is respectful even if you get the answer wrong.'

Students G2 and G5

An additional element we have added to this programme is a problem solving challenge to help these students strengthen our connections to the maths language we encounter when reading and trying to make sense of written maths questions.