As a profession, we teachers seem to love reinventing the wheel and, particularly as I was training and in my NQT year, this frustrated me. Even more experienced teachers of 10, 20 years in the profession, who can pull out an old resource or plan from their files, seemed to be constantly needing to resource their lessons from scratch. To make matters worse, several schools I've come across seem to be anti-text book and/or anti-worksheet meaning teachers can feel like they need to create all their questions from scratch even for pupils to practice basic skills. I know this was certainly my experience.
Surely there were great resources out there that were tried and tested? Indeed there are but (I'm going to let you in on a big secret here, are you ready?) the internet is a very big place and finding quality resources can take time, especially when you're new. Which is why when Joe Kirby wrote about renewable resources a few years ago it was an idea that immediately gripped me. So, when a colleague of mind brought back a maths basic skills worksheet from a trip to Shanghai, it sparked an idea. The aim of these sheets was to ensure quick and automated basic skills using the four operations, comparison and representation. I knew straight away that several pupils in my class would benefit from this sort of regular, low stakes practice but I didn't want to have to create a new sheet every time I wanted them to practice these skills: if they had the same sheet too often then they could just learn the pattern of answers and it was going to be too time consuming to create a new sheet every time. I had a dilemma and needed a renewable solution. Step forward Microsoft Excel. I worked with a colleague, Anna Daubney, to create several sheets which would enable this sort of practice and generate new questions at the press of a button so that the same pattern and style of questions appeared every time but with new questions to answer. Hey-presto, we had our first renewable resource. We went on to create similar sheets for Fraction, Decimal and Percentage equivalence and for Times Tables. Over the years, we've tweaked the different sheets and I still use them when my pupils need them. If you think you may find them useful too, you can find a link to all of these on the resources tab of this site. Why reinvent the wheel? Sharing is caring!
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SATS prep
For weeks leading up to SATs, Year 6 teachers up and down the country were madly prepping their pupils for end of KS2 SATs. Now that the annual week of madness has come and gone, I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit back and reflect on which strategies were most effective in preparing my pupils for the end of Key Stage assessments. I don't know about you, but one of my most common frustrations when pupils complete tests (in any year group) is the unnecessary, avoidable errors that they make on questions you KNOW they can do; the sort of mistakes that you know pupils will kick themselves about when you go through the answers with them. But sometimes something magical happens...when pupils are asked to spot errors in someone else's work, it's all so simple. I decided to try this with my own class in the lead up to our end of year assessments. The pupils were each given a completed SATs script with many errors based on common misconceptions and errors... "Is this really Year 6 work?" one girl asked me. "Was this person even paying attention? This is so easy!" muttered another pupil. When the magic happens Yep, the moment they became the marker, rather than the test taker, the pupils could more easily identify and correct mistakes in arithmetic, they could identify a misconception in grammar and they could understand where others had gone wrong in that tricky reasoning problem. And the best bit? They could do it WITHOUT needing the mark scheme. I know this all sounds a little too good to be true; it isn't always quite the land of milk and honey I might have just described. Some pupils still didn't get it all and others struggled to work at the pace they would need to during the real thing. This isn't a fix-all solution. But the magical part is that just by reversing the roles, pupils were spotting mistakes they had been making for months. "Oh I get it now!" and "Yep, I make this mistake all the time," followed by furious scribbling of the correct answer, a response in the marking box and a brief explanation about what the pupil may have done wrong. For the purposes of this trial run, I allowed pupils to work together, in pairs or small groups, if they got stuck. They were encouraged to come and speak with me if necessary and use all the usual classroom resources whilst I worked with lower attaining students to help build their confidence in the marking progress. And they were HOOKED! Solid grounding Now, at this point I feel like it is important to make one thing clear: all of this is only possible if the pupil has a solid enough understanding of the concepts the question is testing in the first place. If they don't know understand, if they don't already have a good grounding in the key ideas and processes then just becoming the marker isn't going to suddenly impart the knowledge and understanding that has eluded them throughout their primary education. But the real success was that my pupils were able to identify common mistakes and errors that children throughout the country have made on these papers: mistakes that many of them would make themselves. Now that they know these mistakes, now that they have sat on the other side of the table and seen what it is like, they are less likely to make the same mistakes again (or at least I hope so - similar mistakes were certainly less prevalent in our end of year assessments). I definitely intend to re-run this in future years and not just with Year 6s. I have a strong suspicion this will be a useful exercise for pupils throughout KS2 and would love to hear from others who have tried anything similar in other year groups. A well-rounded education Of course, SATs are not (should not) be the be all and end all. Yes, it's important that children do well but only as part of a well rounded education. Doing well in SATs should be a happy bi-product of a good primary education, not the goal. We should set pupils up to succeed in the next stage of their education, thinking carefully about where the curriculum journey takes them, and if we do this effectively then SATs results should take care of themselves. Now, I know that this is not the reality for many schools who feel the pressure of exam results, floor standards and OFSTED ratings but we can dream of a day when all schools are able to focus on planning and delivering a great curriculum so that results look after themselves because of a high quality education! If you are interested in downloading a set of completed misconception papers based on the 2017 SATs you can do so for free here. Thanks to Anna Daubney for her help in creating these!
A short while ago, a friend of mine asked me for a list of my favourite primary blogs. She’s a secondary teacher but has recently become a primary school governor and wants to learn more about data in a primary specific setting. I struggled to come up with data specific blogs at first but luckily James Pembroke came to my rescue with this blog and then I found Becky Allen's three part series on grading (albeit not primary specific). *As I was about to publish this post, I also came across a recent Teacher Tapp post on KS2 value added from Education Datalab which may be of use.*
But this whole search for data based blogs got my thinking. There are some INCREDIBLE edu-tweeters and bloggers out there but which ones do I find myself going back to time and time again? Which ones are specific to Primary education?
The 'big' exams and qualifications happen when Primary education is a distant(ish) memory for most students when they're taking their GCSEs, A-Levels or other important qualifications. But it is called *Primary* because it comes first (ok, so EYFS is actually first but just go with me on this). In *Primary*, we help secure the central building blocks in any pupil's education. It is called *Primary* because it is of primary importance to a child's education. It's called *Primary* for a reason and it's important we get it right so it's important we highlight Primary specific topics in the big wide world that is edu-twitter/blogosphere. So, without any further ado, the following are my go-to primary specific guides (whilst still touching on things that are applicable across the phases). They’re definitely not restricted to data but at one point or another, either on twitter or on their blogs, but I’m sure with a little searching you can find data specific blogs. People with a great overview and/or high level ideas to inspire:
Finally, I want to shout out a few other blogs from people whose resources and/or ideas I seem to steal on an increasingly frequent basis. Check them out!
What Primary focused blogs would you recommend?
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