Here you will find a summary of the tasks we worked on in the primary workshops during our first day with the NRICH Ambassadors from the Cambridge and Archimedes Maths Hubs on January 11, 2017.
Here are some photos showing the ways in which we arranged our dominoes in order to find out whether or not we had a full set:
We discussed research by Kenneth Ruthven which suggests a model for teaching mathematics: exploration -> codification -> consolidation, rather than a 'show then practice' model found in some mathematics lessons. Although the context is secondary mathematics, this feels very relevant for primary too. You can read the paper, published in Educational Studies in Mathematics 20
(1989) here: ExploratoryTeachingKRuthven.pdf
We also mentioned the idea of convincing yourself, convincing a friend and convincing a sceptic as a way of encouraging learners to develop logical arguments and proof (see the book Thinking Mathematically written by John Mason with Leone Burton and Kaye Stacey).
Amy's Dominoes
We looked at the accompanying sections of Amy's Dominoes on the website, all of which can be found using the links to the left of the problem title once you are viewing the task itself. These include the Teachers' Resources, Getting Started and Solution tabs.
We navigated to the Primary Teacher Homepage from the homepage of NRICH, where you can view the 'current feature' (at the time this was 'Celebrating Solutions'). A feature is at least one article and a group of tasks, all focusing on a particular theme. We clicked on the 'Primary Curriculum' page in the
right-hand menu of the Primary Teacher Homepage to find links to the primary mapping documents.
We explored the Early Years Foundation Stage homepage and looked at the template for all these activities (which are downloadable and printable pdfs). We browsed examples of these tasks and then used the Topic Search to show how they can be located more easily by their mathematical
focus, by clicking on the 'Early Years Foundation Stage' group link.
We discussed the characteristics of rich mathematical tasks and the characteristics of low threshold high ceiling (LTHC) tasks, which are a subset of rich tasks.
Navigating our way to the Primary Curriculum page again, we explored the mapping documents more thoroughly and looked at the Collections, which are groups of tasks focusing on different areas of the curriculum. The Collections may include tasks which are not on the mapping documents.