Letting things develop

We started off the term establishing a few ground rules, like, "It's OK to make mistaekes mistakes."

Felix made us laugh. We got talking about how there was a lot of falling off involved when we learnt to ride a bike.

"The first time I rode a bike I didn’t fall off,"

There was a pause, a doubtful but slightly impressed pause, before he added, with perfect timing, "But I did crash into a hedge," and, "At least it wasn’t a brick wall."

Then we began our maths work with a look at our number line.

Our number line, up high

We've put one in both Y4 classes (I think Y5 are going to use it too). It's based on math4love's wonderful Prime Climb game - which we're going to play next week.

We looked at the number line, and then at the hundred square poster:

We looked individually first of all. "What do you notice?" was the question. Then pairs. Then shared a few observations as a class. It was interesting that at first the class weren't seeing the multiples in there. They were looking at how many divisions of the circle there were, and then later beginning to look at how the colours were patterned. Then we wrote down a few of our observations. I accepted anything correct or half correct, even, "there are a lot of colours" and passed the adventurous and sometimes knowledgeable but over-hasty with a light touch of doubt. We left it after fifteen minutes and then returned to it the next day, today. We shared some of what we'd written, and then things started to come together, people were noticing the patterns more and more. Jinmin noticed that 51 had a little 17 in it and it was in the 17 times table! Here's Maryam's observations in her journal:

It's exciting to see how thoughts develop. I haven't really been giving hints. Just asking the class to move between individual looking, pair looking, sharing out loud with the whole class, writing, and then coming back the next day for a little more of the same. Some of the children are going to be familiar with this in a different form; it's great seeing them gradually recognise it again by the sheer power of noticing!