New school year, new beginnings, new opportunities
Jennie Pennant, the PD Primary Coordinator at NRICH, writes about new developments on the NRICH site and the NRICH provision for your school.
Do you remember those days as a child when you got ready for the new school year? How was it for you? Was it the fun of going to choose a new pencil case and brand-new, unsharpened pencils? Was it wondering what your new teacher was going to be like and worrying about how you could possibly grow into that uniform that seemed to be two sizes too big! Or may be it was something different for you.
Whatever it was, September is certainly a time for new beginnings for schools in England.
Here at NRICH we have been preparing for the new school year by re-organising our site to help you access the wealth of support for your school and classroom more easily. When you go to our site at http://nrich.maths.org you will see our new look - colour scheme, layout and logo. You will see that we are developing an area of the site for children to access directly and one for you, as teachers,
to explore.
We are working on providing you with lists and collections of key resources with a pertinent classroom theme that will help you use the rich activities in your school and classroom. All your old favourites are still there - such as the curriculum mapping document - and all our resources still have the detailed teacher notes to help you embed the
activities in your particular classroom.
When you next take a look at our site, you will see that there is a scrolling banner at the top of the page. The banner highlights for you items that we think will be of particular interest to you, either because they are new or because they are current. The items in the banner will change regularly. The idea that our site changes monthly is gradually becoming a thing of the past!
What has happened to the new problems each month that are open for children to send us their solutions? These are now the featured problems on the teacher and student pages. We will be delighted to receive the children's solutions as usual and will continue to publish a selection of them. As we move away from our monthly cycle you will be able to see when a problem has closed for solutions by the
published closing dates.
To start us all off with the new way of working on the NRICH site we are featuring dice games for our first collection. This is the theme for both the student page and the teacher page. We have chosen dice games as they are a great vehicle for engaging with formative assessment of your new class at the start of the academic year. We consider how such games can be helpful in developing
an understanding of children's proficiency with key mathematical skills, their understanding of mathematical concepts and elements of their problem-solving abilities. In our new collection you will find featured problems -these are the ones open for solutions - articles that help you explore formative assessment in the classroom, and further problems that have the solutions already there.
Keeping up to date with what's going on at NRICH is very easy these days. You can follow us on Twitter @nrichmaths and also Facebook. That way you'll get our latest inspirations and ideas as they happen. You can also get sign up for our regular newsletter at http://nrich.maths.org/public/mailinglist.php and get a digest of all that is
happening at NRICH to support you in your school.
One of our recent developments is offering support for MaST graduates, students and tutors. Primary arithmetic and rich tasks is a very current focus for us all in our schools and this is one of the areas that we are exploring at our MaST conferences at the London Mathematical Society. We are also developing collections of resources for MaST graduates and students to support them in developing
the highest quality of Learning and Teaching across all classrooms in their schools. We are interested to see that Ofsted have highlighted this as a priority in their recent report Mathematics: Made to Measure.
If you are a MaST graduate or student, then we have an email group just for you so that you can be the first to hear about our next conferences and new collections on the site as they appear. If you are a MaST tutor at an HEI or LA then you have your own email list. We look forward to meeting many of you at our conferences.
We'd be delighted to receive your feedback on our new look and hear your ideas for subsequent collections that you would find useful. Do email me on jp591@cam.ac.uk with your thoughts and ideas. Meanwhile, here's wishing you a mathematically-rich Autumn term as you get to know the learners in your class and support them all to become confident and competent mathematicians.