Imagine that you have just been told you are to
teach a very weak bottom maths set this year.

In September 1986, I was asked to teach a very weak bottom set (Set 6) in Y9. I asked my HoD if I could take them off the Y9 syllabus and try to develop something more suitable for them. He said, “OK but they will have to do the same end-of-year exam as the others.

They weren’t happy. “We’re not thick!” They wanted to do the same work as Set 5.

What had I let myself in for? I needed something with impact to win their trust.

You may have met the game of “Frogs”. Imagine 5 chairs placed in a row. The middle chair is empty; two boys sit on one side and two girls on the other side. The rest of the class are told that they must move the girls to the left side and the boys to the right. They can only give two kinds of instruction: slide one place the left/right or hop over one student to an empty seat. I asked for a volunteer to give the instructions and then the others all had a go. We counted the total number of moves needed. I asked them to find the smallest number of moves needed. This was continued until every student could make the changeover in 8 moves. They could also tell me what the strategy was and what moves to avoid.

I then gave each pair a sheet of squared paper and asked them to try the same problem on the paper with 3 red and 3 blue counters. Total disaster – they could not cope with this step! This could be the end of the adventure. Then Chris suggested that we put the counters onto 7 chairs and try it. It worked brilliantly and they moved confidently onto squared paper.

Later, I asked them to find out what happens if they have different numbers of counters on each side. No problem! They took over and I just watched. They organised their results on the board. They put together groups of results using the same values of L and R. They decided that they needed 3 matching results for each set of counters so that they knew that the values were correct. They put their results onto a table with 3 columns: L, R, & N.

As we all looked at this table, I asked them if they thought that there would be a rule connecting the values of L and R with the number of moves, N? I thought this might be a step too far, but they were keen to try. I gave them 10 minutes or so and then they put their possible ideas onto the board and we all looked at them. Some of the ideas worked for some values but not for others. You cannot imagine the concentration of that class as they tried to find the rule. I didn’t know the rule at that stage. Then Sophie, sitting at the back, looking at the values we had put for L+W & LxW, spotted it. If you add together the values of L+W and LxW, you get the number of moves!!! The class exploded with delight!

So what had I given these students? They had certainly lost their fear of maths. They had all developed more self-confidence and had enjoyed their maths lessons. They were keen to do more maths.

It was a very busy year for me as I strove to develop interesting ways to introduce and develop topics for them. They did a lot of number and shape work with total enjoyment and their self-confidence continued to grow.

Shortly after Christmas, I gave a top set a new type of problem for homework. They had just been working on Area and Volume. I gave them the dimensions of a brick and the size of the garage that was to be built and asked them to estimate how many bricks would be needed. 7 divided the volume of the garage by the volume of one brick, 11 had garages with four walls and 12 could not do it. A class discussion ensued and sensible estimates were produced.

My mood was not good when I left them and went to teach my Y9 bottom set. They spotted that I was a little annoyed and asked me why. I told them to leave it until the end of the lesson. Later I explained what had happened, and they asked if they could do the same problem for their homework? 11 out of the 12 came up with sensible estimates!!

But the crowning moment of the year came after the Y9 end-of-year exam. The exam was the same for all sets. My students in Set 6 did better than all but one of the students in Set 5. Wow!!!

In many later blogs, I will demonstrate some approaches to topics that work well with low attainers.

In the meantime, would you like to try some of the free sample material from the Y7 & Y8 texts for low attainers on our website?
Visit http://mathsisjugglers.com

You’ll find 4 mini-samples (5-19 pages long) for each text, with permission to download and use with your students. There’s also one whole topic for each text to use with your students, as well as teacher resources (and, of course, the answers!). Links to these samples are at the top of every page of the website, labelled DOWNLOADS.

If you’d like to find out more about The ‘Maths is…’ Jugglers textbooks you are always welcome to get in touch – you can reach me at barbara.young@mathsisjugglers.com or on 01428 717113.

Kind regards,

Barbara (maths enthusiast, teacher, writer and director of The ‘Maths is…’ Jugglers)