Numeracy Lesson Starters Volumes 2 and 3
These CDs are something of a curate’s egg – good in parts. Each CD contains 25 activities for use at Key Stages 1 and 2 (not Key Stages 2 and 3 as claimed on the website). They are designed to be used with an interactive white board although they work equally well on a single PC.
<< The contents listing can be found here
Some of the activities are great. I liked the four in a row game – two teams take it in turn to answer questions and place a blue or red button on a rhombus grid. But it is a shame the level of calculations cannot be changed.
<< Additional screenshots can be seen here
There are a lot of missed opportunities:
For example, the ‘How many squares?’ activity (above) only counted the 1 × 1 squares. It left me wondering how many 2 × 2 squares are there? How many 3 × 3 squares? How many in total?
With the ‘Polyhedra fruit machine’ the ‘Mixed’ option only gave a variation on addition and subtraction and so it misses the opportunity to look at BODMAS.
The graphics are rather dated and in some cases, such as in ‘The Wolf, Goat and Cabbage’, they are quite poor. This is hardly the sort of thing that will appeal to students familiar with Wii.
Some of the games are repeated but with different graphics, for example the astronomical fruit machine on disc 3 is virtually identical to the polyhedra fruit machine.
The website claims that “the activities are based on The Framework for Mathematics including parts of Numeracy, Shape and Space and the vocabulary of mathematics”, however there is no documentation to back up the statement. The only documentation supplied is a list of the activities with an overview of the activity and very brief - a few sentences - ‘teacher’s notes’.
Most of the activities are familiar, there is the Knight’s problem taken from Dudeny, solitaire, two games of pelmanism (memory pairs), Wolf, goat and cabbage, frogs and toads (aka jumping frogs). Many of the activities are already freely available from the Internet. See for example the games and activities available at:
- Cut the Knot
- Birmingham City Council’s Lesson starters site
- Crickweb’s Keystage 1 and Keystage 2 numeracy resources
- Woodlands Junior School
The CDs are a great idea, but unfortunately, the resources available on the Internet make them largely redundant.
Steve Bishop • Maths lecturer, City of Bristol College
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