If you missed us at the recent Scottish Mathematical Council Online Conference or our sessions clashed with other sessions you were attending but you still wanted to access the materials, we have now put links to the three sessions we delivered on the CPD section of the blog but for convenience have also added them here with a brief summary of what we were presenting on. Click on the images to go to the session recording.
Counting Collections
Seonaid and Julie delivered a session on Counting Collections exploring how this can encourage all pupils to gain confidence in counting and develop better number sense. It shares reflections from staff and pupils in Highland with the aim of showing how engaging, challenging and inclusive this activity is when supporting children working within Early to Second Level.
Building Better Basics
Sarah presented this session based on work she’s been exploring over the past few years. The presentation uses pupil work from all across Highland from projects that Sarah, Julie and Seonaid have been leading.
The presentation explores why some pupils may struggle to retain their basic facts if the starting point is not quite right, i.e. too abstract before solid understanding has developed. It looks at the importance of building strong foundations through sense making, word problems and concrete materials/visuals/pupil drawings as well as making connections to prior knowledge. It then looks at building on these strong foundations supporting pupils to develop fluency and apply their understanding with the overall aim of improving long-term understanding and retention.
Fractions Progression
Sarah and Andy (Northern Alliance) presented this session based on work that Sarah and Julie have been undertaking over the past few years. The presentation uses work from pupils across Highland in schools where we’ve been running projects related to fractions.
The session explores a progression in fractions from Early Level to Second Level with particular focus on the measurement and quotient subconstructs. The ideas shared aim to support pupils to make sense of fractions rather than just learn procedures to answer questions without necessarily developing strong understanding.
We are currently working on an update to the Highland Numeracy Progression and a fractions progression forms a large part of this update. It has been a long time in the making… Sarah and Julie originally started this work back in 2015 but due to a number of other commitments and setbacks it has yet to be finished. We are a lot closer now though and hope that we can share it more widely in the not too distant future!
We hope you enjoy them and as ever if you notice any mistakes or disagree with anything we’ve said then please do get in touch.
For more of our recorded CPD, check out our CPD page.
If you want to take a look at other presentations that were delivered as part of the SMC Conference then you can find the presentations here.
