Mental Maths – Skills and Strategies
Mental Maths – Skills and Strategies is a set of 6 books (one for each year) in what looks at first glace like text book format. It is not quite that, consisting of “photocopiable resources” for “all you need to teach mental calculation strategies effectively”. Wow!
If you are still reading this, I must admit that the books arrived at the beginning of the summer holiday. So instead of enlisting the advice of teachers, who should be forgetting about such things for a while, I asked a couple of the ultimate consumers, children, what they thought.
Tom is nine and poised between Years 4 and 5 and Ben, seven, between Years 2 and 3. Tom perused the books for Years 4, 5 and 6 and wrote notes at the same time as almost continuous commentary and Ben looked at those for Years 1, 2 and 3 making extremely grown-up remarks which I wrote down. I should add that both children are good at, and enjoy, maths at school.
The first thing that struck the boys was the cartoon-type characters on every page. Ben thought they made it “more enjoyable” but Tom remarked severely that “by the time you are in Year 5 you don’t need aliens all over your maths!”. He added that the captions that the characters sometimes hold could be useful (an example from Book 4 ‘Remember: brackets first’). These cartoon characters are different in each book, but this does underline my unease about a series which has virtually the same format for all six primary years.
There are four graded exercises and a “Listen and write” section on each page as well as a problem question at the end with different titles ranging from “Thinking Caps On!” for Year 1 to “Challenge!” at Year 6. Some of these are quite interesting. Tom picked out one he liked from Book 6:
“Write signs or symbols to make each statement true: 4 ... 6 ... 2 = 26, 4 ... 6 ... 2 = 32 ... etc.”
Each book also has eight pages called “Take Break”. Both boys liked these. Ben selected one from Book 3 consisting of calculations written down in interesting ways and Tom chose a maze from Book 5 done by colouring in the calculations which are correct. Tom remarked gloomily, “Those are the sort of things teachers leave out when they are in a hurry!”
I should, I suppose, add that the books are National Curriculum/Numeracy Strategy/SATs friendly. I think they could be a very useful resource in a well-stocked primary staffroom library.
But what about the consumers? My final question to my young reviewers was “Would you like your teacher to use these books?” Both answered “Yes”.
Jenny Murray
Independent Maths Consultant – Suffolk
Mental Maths – Skills and Strategies
Andrew J Woods
Oxford
6 books
£19.99 each
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