I wonder how many Blogs are floating around the internet with one or two posts before updating regularly becomes consumed by the day to day business of teaching and learning takes over and they become ship wrecked, left stranded where a few passing strangers will see them and then leave them, forgotten.

It’s been quite busy for me, with house moving and getting my head round new job but I am back in the position to start thinking again. Not that my time has been wasted, I’ve been doing a lot of reading (and listening to the excellent Craig Barton podcast) ready to get my head round the first series of my maths curriculum. I’ve also done work with KS2 resources and materials to get my head round transition. On the other hand I haven’t unpacked all the boxes from my house nor fully reassembled IKEA furniture.

Series One: Addition and Subtraction

Series Overview. During this series I want to explore addition and subtraction, to introduce the characters that are needed for later serieses and to allow the audience to have a feel of the epic scale of the world which this series is set. I want it to build up, and somehow reach a finale where audience are excited about the next series (the one where we get to multiply as well)

Recurring Characters

In the olden days (so, about six months ago if I was writing a curriculum) I would have probably have taught discrete episodes. I would have made sure students knew place value, I would have done column addition and subtraction. I would have spoken about decimals. I would have taught about shapes and perimeter. And I would have had a lesson on rounding. There may also have a holiday special or two on the history of maths. But… they would have been no linkage. What I want to do is keep building on things. One reason for this is that the I want to reenforce the knowlege by makign students having to recall it and improving the retrieval strength of that information. But, I mainly want to get rid of that myth of “We’ve done this topic” and the idea that we can always expand on our prior learning.

The Setting for a lot of this series will be in Perimeter and Polygons, but also I want to have the use of different bases as a different setting… like Daenerys on the Dothraki Sea whilst the Perimeter is my Westeros. I want to talk about ordering, addition, subtraction, metric conversions, decimals. I want to show these in the practical sence each time looking at my perimeter in more detail, with more depth of knowlege – but then looking at how these skills are used in different bases and how these bases are/were used.

As I see it my series starts at place value and ends up looking at compound shapes, finding perimter and missing sides, with decimals and metric conversions – ready to look at area.

Place Value: Integers

Roman Numerals

Counting in other Bases

Rounding to 10s, 100s, Ones.

Metric Conversions

Addition and Subtraction of Integers

Addition and Subtraction in other bases

Perimeter of Polygons (Integers)

Place Value:  Decimals

Ordering Decimals

Addition and Subtraction of Decimals

Questions involving Money

Rounding to decimal places

Rounding to significant figures

Estimation

Perimeter of Polygons/Compound Shapes (Decimals)

I realise that is just a list of topics – the least helpful planning tool – but hopefully the progression can be seen where these topics are recapped throughout, with column addition and subtraction the key characters who are being used in different settings. I also like the links to future estimation by just hinting at it, like a sneak preview of a future character.

I’ve never watched Games of Thrones on TV… so I’ve been reading the books (or actually listening to the audiobooks) . It means i’m going through the excitment everyone else went through a while back. So apologies if this is influencing the way I describe maths at the moment .