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.  

Spring Into Maths...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to observe Karen, one of our amazing teacher aides, taking a Spring Into Maths session with three of my students who are part of her withdrawal group. What stuck with me the most was the atmosphere in the room. My students were smiling throughout and confidently offering answers to questions, even when they weren't sure of the answer. The latter is something I see happening in the classroom only when they are confident their response is correct. The self efficacy I saw is something I really hope can be transferred back to the classroom.

Spring Into Maths is an intervention program used to provide extra support in number knowledge and strategies for students with knowledge gaps in maths. It is not new to me as I have incorporated this programme into my maths lessons on numerous occasions over the years, however is not something I have been running formally in my maths programme this year. I asked these students what they liked the most about being part of this maths group. Here are their responses:

• JA -  'The games Miss because we can challenge each other in a fun way.'
• AK - 'I like the number challenges because we can try and get a better score than what we got last time. It shows that we know stuff.'
• SB - 'I like being able to say my answer and I don't feel shy because there's only three of us and I really like the games.'

Going forward I am going to rework my maths programme to incorporate the hands on elements of Spring Into Maths into our maths sessions. I saw first hand how powerful being able to manipulate materials is, and see this as another way stronger connections can be made to the knowledge my learners need to be able to operate confidently in a mathematical capacity. 

I began this morning's lesson by explaining the changes I wanted to make to our maths learning time, and as I wanted buy-in from everyone we spent today's session playing the huge amount of number knowledge games that had been most definitely underused in my class this year. The buzz of noise meant this was most definitely not a quiet lesson, and like yesterday all I saw were smiling faces, engaged learners and some outstanding collaboration as they negotiated their answers. 

I'm looking forward to see if this change can help all my students see that they can recall and use their number knowledge skills confidently at speed.