Times Table Rockstars

I am going to try to do, and blog about, one new thing at school each week. This week I have trialled "Times Table Rockstars" with my Year 9 group - an invention created by @MrReddyMaths to make practising times tables fun and recommended by an old ITT student of mine (thanks Sophie!). One of my main focuses this academic year as Numeracy Co-ordinator is to increase basic numeracy skills of our students across the school, and this programme is a fantastic and engaging way of doing this, especially with choosing your own "rockstar" identity. Tori Wynter is mine and I use the avatar on my lesson slides:

I chose my Year 9 group as they are a mid-bottom set who have become disengaged in Maths and lack confidence. There are quite a lot of boys in there who are big characters, and the competitive nature of the Times Table Rockstars has really engaged them, I began by doing the initial baseline quiz in their first lesson, and I was very surprised to see 5 whole minutes of complete silence and total engagement whilst every single student hurriedly tried to complete their grid. I then set them for homework the task of logging on (really good tip by Mr Reddy is to use existing usernames and passwords - I have used their email addresses and MyMaths passwords) and choosing their "rockstar" names. Not only did every single student do this, but two-thirds of the class went on to take part in the challenges with my highest scoring student already at £1135 coins!

As we only have the trial version at the moment, my next step is to get each of the teachers in my department to trial it with one group. I don't think it is going to be useful for every student in the school, but at least 1 or 2 classes per year group I think will really benefit. I am carrying out the paper based challenges twice a week for 4 weeks as a starter task. The students get 3 minutes to answer 60 questions, and what I also like is the sheets include both multiplying and dividing so the students become familiar with the relationships between the numbers in the times table. I put a stopwatch on the board and if they finish before the 3 minutes is up they write down their time and I collect these in as well as their scores. This gives the students a speed of number of seconds per correct answer which is all input into one spreadsheet and averaged out across the weeks.

I have found this is a really positive way to start a lesson. I make a fuss of those students on the leaderboard from the Internet-based challenges (using their rockstar names) and the top three fastest students from the paper-based challenges, and the competitiveness of the timed starter is a good hook to the rest of the lesson.I would definitely recommend investing in this programme!

Next week I am going to attempt to make a bit more out of the wall space in my classroom. We have a new member of the department who is excellent at this - I am in awe of her classroom! This is the third year I have been in my classroom and apart from some standard displays I have done little to really put my own stamp on it. So my challenge for this week is to find an unused space on my walls somewhere and make something of it!

Doing my bit for Literacy

As Numeracy Co-ordinator I work closely with our school's Literacy co-ordinator, and in addition to that my husband has just got promoted at his school to be Literacy co-ordinator so I do feel a little bit of pressure to support the literacy initiatives in my school. Despite that I have a Year 9 tutor group who love to read, and I know there are so many benefits of encouraging this that I wanted to do my bit to promote literacy going into the new year.

Firstly I decided to create a "Book Box" for my classroom as we will be doing one session of silent reading a week during tutor time, and so often some students in my tutor group turn up without books, even if they do enjoy reading. I thought it would be a nice idea to have some to hand which they can choose from and I have enjoyed going around car boot sales and rummaging through charity shops to select some titles which may entice some of the less enthusiastic readers in my tutor group. I have even included some titles I enjoyed from my childhood including "Goosebumps" and have tried to consider what both girls and boys turning 14 would enjoy.

As well as the "Book Box" I have also spent a little bit of time creating bookmarks for each student in my group. It was very cheap to do and didn't take too long, I just bought some coloured card and ribbon offsets from Amazon, then a book of 1000 letter stickers and just stuck their names to a bookmark-sized piece of card. I'm quite proud of the outcome (being someone who is not very creative!) and I will have the bookmarks out on their desks in their new seating plan to try to promote reading from the word go this year. I hope it will also be a nice gift to start off the new term.

I would like to get the students to write book reviews of the books in the box throughout the year and put the reviews in a folder in the box to help other students select a book which might be of interest. I wanted to reward the students for doing this in some way, and may use raffle tickets to do so which could be drawn at the end of each term or the end of the year as a book token for a prize. I did also want to reward the students for reading books in a similar way but am not sure how have a fair system in which students earn raffle tickets without them playing the system and saying they have read a book when they haven't so I may need a little more thought on that one.

Key Stage 4 Tutor Numeracy Challenge

Last year I set up a Tutor Numeracy Challenge for KS3 tutor groups to complete during tutor time. I used mainly UKMC questions to create PowerPoints of 5 questions which I emailed around to each KS3 tutor once a week, and put answer forms in their register folders which had to be completed and handed back to me by the end of the week. It was fairly successful, I got about an 80% response rate but found some tutors would complete it every week and some did not do it at all, which meant the same tutor groups were winning each term. It was also quite a lot of work on my part, I would write the quiz each week along with the solutions to the previous week onto slides and email around the tutors, then collate all the answer forms, mark them and input the results onto a spreadsheet. What I wanted to do was try to get something online so questions could be accessed each week by the tutor and solutions submitted online but I haven't yet found a way of doing this, so I will be writing them all on PowerPoint again for this academic year. One plus point the school will be introducing in September is more structured tutor times so each tutor group will have a designated slot to complete the tutor challenge meaning I should get a 100% response rate and therefore this should encourage competition between the tutor groups. This is an example of one of my slides I used last year:

This year the KS4 leader has approached me to come up with something for Year 10 and 11 who will have a 15 minute designated tutor slot once every 2 weeks. I have decided to go down a similar route but this time with only two questions - a green question and a red question. The green question will be aimed more at Foundation level and will be worth 5 points whilst the red question will be aimed at Higher level and will be worth 10 points so all of the tutor group should be able to be involved. I looked at using Socrative, which I haven't used properly yet but I think is excellent, but it didn't do quite what I wanted it to do and I think it will be complicated for the tutors to access the specific quizzes on there so I have gone back to PowerPoint. Ideally I would love to have something where the questions could be accessed by the tutor, displayed on the interactive whiteboard during tutor time and the tutor submits the solutions to me there and then. It would also be useful to have some way of displaying a 'Leaderboard' which I am going to try and use our numeracy board in the Maths department for to try to drum up some competition between the tutor groups. This is something I will have to look into at a later date and try to find to be able to centralise the tutor numeracy challenges across the school.

Both the green and red questions for the KS4 tutor challenge I have tried to get to be problem solving to encourage teamwork among the tutor group. So far I have found both ilovemathsgames Puzzle of the Week blog post and Corbettmaths Corbett's Conundrums, some of which are very challenging to source my questions, so thank you to the authors of both of those fabulous resources.

I would love to hear what other schools do for tutor time numeracy so please leave a comment or tweet me @Mahoney_Maths if you have any ideas you would like to share. Thanks!

Strategies for Increasing Numeracy Skills

September will be my second year in my current role as Numeracy Co-ordinator, a role which I have found both challenging and exciting if a little daunting developing the numeracy skills of our students across the school. The role was brand new last year and in a year I have managed to write our numeracy policy along with resources to help support the numeracy skills of staff, co-ordinate our 1:1 intervention sessions and establish a weekly Maths challenge for KS3 tutor groups. To be honest I have sometimes found it challenging to know what direction to take with the role and how to make an effective change. A lot of this past year has been a matter of 'trial and improvement', some things have been successful and others have taken a total nose dive (such as the weekly staff numeracy challenge!). My husband has just taken on the role of Literacy Co-ordinator at his school and it seems to me there is a lot more published information about what to do and how than with numeracy (possibly something to do with the literacy basis of the job?!) and from my experienced seems to be a policy much more established in schools than numeracy which is comparably in its infancy.

So this year I have got a lot of ideas to develop, one of which I am working on at the moment. I have spent some of my Year 11 gain time last year (and some holiday time) developing our KS3 assessments and as a part of that I wanted to include a numeracy assessment. I have focused on the basic numeracy skills; operations, decimals, percentages, angles and a few other aspects and created (well in the process of!) six almost identical and substantial "Challenge" papers which the KS3 students will sit every September and February. All students with the exception of the bottom year 7 nurture set will sit these papers across their KS3 school experience, and will hopefully see an improvement in their key skills. I have already created a tracking spreadsheet which calculates their percentage change from one assessment to the next and from there I am hoping to rank them to see who is the most improved. This will hopefully also help highlight students across the ability range who struggle with their basic numeracy skills but more importantly put more of an emphasis on the key skills and give students a sense of progress and therefore confidence before they reach KS4.