Ally Mintz from Mathematics Mastery explains how Kate Frood, Headteacher of Eleanor Palmer Primary School (a Mathematics Mastery partner), makes maths lessons fun and effective.

Go to a maths lesson at Eleanor Palmer Primary School and you could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a casino: dice and playing cards fly round the classroom. Only, the games these children are playing have names like “Hungry Jack” and “Top Total”. And crucially, every child in the class is learning to add and subtract, probably without even realising.

Kate Frood, Headteacher at Eleanor Palmer Primary School, believes that games are a great way to get pupils to manipulate numbers and develop mathematical reasoning. Kate is passionate about developing innovative and effective maths teaching, and her school was selected by the government to be a national teaching school.

Eleanor Palmer has been a Mathematics Mastery partner school since 2013. Kate wanted to partner with Mathematics Mastery because she agrees that the principles of depth of understanding and achieving fluency in maths are critical to her pupils’ success.

The Mathematics Mastery partnership is a group of schools who share a set of pedagogic principles and an evidence-based curriculum framework, aligned to the 2014 National Curriculum. Partner schools focus on depth of understanding and giving pupils fluency in maths, and put a major emphasis on subject-specific teacher professional development and collaboration. Initially developed by practitioners within the ARK Schools network, drawing on good practice in the UK, Singapore and elsewhere, it now extends to over 100 UK primary and secondary schools.

Kate explains: “Pupils need to learn to be natural with numbers and integrate them as part of the decisions they make. In playing games with dice and cards, pupils have fun developing strategies to win and outplay their classmates. But they are also learning to add, subtract and subitise automatically, as well as spotting patterns and using reasoning to work out the likely way the game will turn out.

Kate believes that the Mathematics Mastery curriculum provides a great opportunity for teachers to incorporate more creative teaching methods: “Mathematics Mastery encourages teachers to develop their lessons and teaching techniques themselves. The training and online toolkit provide a great framework, but ultimately the key is for teachers to absorb and adapt these resources to suit them and their pupils. I would encourage all teachers to play more maths games with their pupils – all you need are some dice and playing cards.”

Dr Helen Drury, Director of Mathematics Mastery agrees: “Mathematics Mastery isn’t a scheme of work that you print off the internet and teach verbatim to your pupils. The whole point of Mathematics Mastery is to encourage teachers to take resources and build on them – we want to create independent teachers who feel confident developing their own teaching techniques. Introducing maths games into lessons is a great way of developing fluency in maths.” SR

Try in class
| Hungry Jack

• Draw a man, and write the numbers 2 – 12 around the picture, but put 7 in Jack’s tummy.
• Sort children into teams of four or five. Give each player 10 counters (or 5 for the youngest children).
• Take turns to roll two dice. Add them together and put a counter on that number. If a counter is already on that number then the player collects that counter and adds it to their pile of counters.
• Rule – if you put a counter in Jack’s tummy it can never be taken out.
• The winner is the person with the most counters left (including Jack) – either when one person has none left, or you’re fed up!
• This engages students with the topic and helps to cement knowledge and improve recall.

Try in class
| Top Total

• Make two piles of 0 – 10 cards, one in a red suit and one in a black suit.
  Put the piles face down.
• What might the total value of the top two cards be?
• Each player makes a guess and records their guess on a number line.
• Turn over the top two cards and mark the total on the number line.
• The player closest to that total keeps those two cards and leaves them face up on the table.
• This continues, working through the two piles of cards and guessing the total of the next top two until none are left.