Tag Archives: Illuminate

EAL in Maths? Problem Solved!

Where we were working in South East London, a number of students would arrive in England for the first time in the middle of secondary school. They would have very little English language and would try to get into local secondary schools. The schools would turn them away because they assumed that these students would end up with poor grades and compromise their exam statistics. So, a unit was set up to support these students make the transition to school. I got together with Gwyn Jones to produce a course designed to teach the mathematics content of GCSE with the minimum of language, but developing the key technical vocabulary of maths and of school while they learnt. The materials were supported by online interactives to see the maths dynamically and practice the ideas in an open format. There was a very low language pre-test, so that the student could show what they already knew, a tracker sheet to choose the maths they now needed to work on, a large collection of activity sheets to develop the maths and a post test with the same language demands of a normal maths test to show the schools how good they were.

In the very first group of students to use the first version of materials there was a student who had just arrived from East Africa. He had been rejected by every school in the borough. He took the pre-test and got 100%. He worked on the advanced materials and did the same on the post test. He took his work as a portfolio back to the schools and immediately found a place. Within 18 months he had an A* in GCSE maths.

We are proud to announce that we have now redesigned and updated this course and made it available to schools. Called Access to Mathematics it comes as one of our course boxes (like our well known gifted and talented courses; Wondermaths and Illuminate). There is a comprehensive teacher guide with notes on running the course. Ten copies of the comprehensive student book (120 pages) and access to the online interactives, test, answers, etc. in the Access to Mathematics web site. Priced at £195 this gives access to mathematics for all of your students for whom English is an Additional Language from those who have just arrived with no English to those who appear to have conversational English, but cannot access or succeed at maths in lessons.

Everything is described diagrammatically, putting the maths into a visual structure. Two colours are used to emphasise the structure and the maths is practised through this structure, gradually peeling it away to leave the formal symbolic maths. The course worked well supervised by non-specialist teachers as it is designed largely for self-teaching. However, with access to a specialist teacher, the materials could be used for a whole range of learners where reading and language demands of any sort are an issue.

Once you have the box, further copies of the students books are available in packs of 10 priced at £45. So, you can use them as a standard class text if you want. The overall content is covers about 90% of a higher level GCSE.

We are very proud of this publication. We have so often seen excellent mathematicians languishing in low achieving sets simply because they are still learning English and find accessing conventional books difficult. Now, they can quietly and quickly show everyone how much they know and can do, while learning the essential school language that they need.

 

The MathsZone Course Boxes

We’ve been very busy at The MathsZone. Feedback from schools suggested they really love our gifted and talented courses Illuminate and Wondermaths, but they already have some of the materials that come with them. So, we’ve done a major re-design. Still the same fantastic courses for your gifted and talented students at key stage 2 (Wondermaths) or key stage 3 (Illuminate), but now in a neat plastic storage box, which will go on your book shelves. Each one has a comprehensive teacher guide detailing the structure and purpose of all of the sessions, with commentary and solutions (where appropriate!). For the students we have organised the materials into a beautiful student workbook. Now your students can keep all of their work in a really attractive book which they keep at the end of the course. Game cards, dice and counters are included for the activities.

There are fewer puzzles directly referenced in the course, so the price is lower, but of course you can buy all of the puzzles separately to extend the activities. Illuminate comes with a CD Rom with all of the course materials and additional materials for projection. Wondermaths has an associated web site with the materials available. When you are ready to run the course for a second time, you can get extra sets of 10 copies of the workbooks. The key objective for the teacher is to get up and running with the minimum of fuss, so you can focus on supporting your students explore their mathematics.

The aim of both course is to give students the opportunity to explore mathematics. Wondermaths has games, to compare strategies, puzzles to develop sustained thinking and investigational maths top explore maths language and move towards explanation and proof. Illuminate aims to develop the ideas of pure mathematics for those who are limited by the algorithmic nature of school exam courses. Students will develop and compare proofs, while exploring the nature of proof itself. Their is a comprehensive section on group theory, fully accessible to ordinary school students. Games strategies are developed and compared and the course ends with a project in fractal geometry. These are really course in the mathematics that mathematicians would recognise.

Illuminate: Gifted and Talented at Key Stage 3 School Reviews

This is a shameless commercial post because I am really excited that schools who have bought our Illuminate Gifted and Talented Course for key stage 3 have posted on-line reviews on the National STEM centre web site. Obviously I would only be saying this if they like it, but they really like it a lot and that is really exciting.

See here: http://www.stemdirectories.org.uk/scheme/wondermaths-gifted-and-talented-maths/#comments

Our aim was to produce a course in mathematics, so that school students had the opportunity to see what Maths is really all about. It is full of puzzles and games and tricky things to think about, of course if students want to play in playgrounds they can also do this with the best markings from https://bestplaygroundmarkings.co.uk/. But it takes them to the next level by unpicking fundamental ideas notably proof and isomorphism and giving students an incite. Maths gives a way of definitively saying how we know what we know. We use Pythagoras Theorem to unpick the idea of proof. From the essential structuring idea that sets up the proof to the language needed to be clear and the sequencing of the statements to construct the complete argument. It is thrilling that schools are reporting that students are able and interested to work on this. It is hard, but interesting things are, but students are game to carry on. Then we compare cyclic and Klein groups with isometries and modulo arithmetic. I cannot think there is anything more wonderful for the beginning mathematician to see that we can show that two complete areas of operation, so apparently dissimilar as arithmetic of clocks and transformational geometry have exactly the same underlying structure and hence, if we know something about one, we necessarily know the same thing about the other. That, to me is what maths is really all about. The mechanical processes that students learn for their GCSE and A Levels give no insight into this amazing world.

So, well done to those schools for being brave enough to work this way and really well done to the students who are becoming serious young mathematicians. Clearly we would be delighted for you to try it too. Just ask for some trial materials of the Illuminate course.

Also, come to ATM sessions and meet Danny Brown. Danny is the head of maths at the Greenwich Free School and he is getting his kids working on deep mathematical ideas all the time. Danny has presented regularly to ATM London Branch and has a web site of the amazing stuff he does. I persuaded Danny to get this out in book form and the first volume, on Number, is nearly ready, so look out for that.

Gifted and Talented at Maths

About four years ago, I was asked if I could run a course for year 6 students from inner city London primary schools, who had been identified as ‘gifted and talented‘ in maths. Now, I’m troubled by this idea in general. What measures schools might use to identify gifted and talented is very hard to tell. My idea of a good mathematician is almost never the person who correctly answers all the arithmetic questions. However, the truth of the matter was that they were ordinary kids in ordinary schools. Continue reading Gifted and Talented at Maths