AS IN THE LONG AGO

In the long ago every infant classroom had a nature table.  'Nature walks' were a thing.  We went on them most weeks through the school grounds, looking for signs of Spring, or Autumn.  Most of the old teaching guides I possess are full of images from the natural world.  I would be very happy if my children had this kind of lesson at school, and I'd also be happy if they saw illustrations of this quality instead of endless clip-art.

This is the title of a maths game devised by Zoltan P Dienes .  He thought up a lot of games.  This one is a way of gradually familiarising children with the ideas underlying place value.  To play, you need Duplo or Lego, though you could use any construction toy, and you need a dice marked with only the numbers 1, 2, and 0.  The players throw the dice in turn and collect bricks according to the number they throw.  When they have enough to stick 3 bricks together they must do so and shout SESAME!  If they don't, another player can say SESAME, claim their three bricks and make their own SESAME with them. With very young children the winner is the first to make a SESAME.  Later on they can carry on playing until they have 3 sets of three when they must shout SUPER SESAME! In the same way, the game can be played with money.  Using a dice marked, say, with numbers from 0 to 4, a player who has enough for 5p must shout SWAP! and change their 5 pe...

I love really simple ideas and simple activities for teaching.  I often see worksheets used in the classroom where more time is spent explaining the activity than in teaching and learning.  So, here is the Twenty Pence Giveaway game.  It is a powerful tool for teaching the concepts of exchange and place value, as well as providing lots of practice in counting and mental calculation.  It has the great virtue of needing very little equipment - a dice, a few 20p pieces and an assortment of 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins. Each player starts with a 20p coin.  The object of the game is to get rid of your 20p.  The bank in the middle contains all the change, and that's where you put the money you give away. The first player throws the dice.  Say they throw a 4.  They change their 20p into any combination of coins that will allow them to put 4p into the bank.  Beginners may well want to change the 20p into 20 1p coins.  They should be allowed to...

The tin of words is a symbol of the innate conservatism of the infant teacher.  When I was training as a teacher I studied plenty of different methods of teaching reading, but no one told me that I would need to start collecting two-ounce tobacco tins.   I'm not suggesting that the 'inventor' of the Look and Say method, the late Fred Schonell , specified an old tobacco tin for the transportation of words to and from home, but when I started teaching they were to be found in most infant classrooms.  Children in the real world learnt to read using a reading scheme and a tin of words. The system worked like this:  using a graded scheme like Sheila McCullough's ' 1, 2, 3 and Away' featuring Roger Red-hat, Jennifer Yellow-hat et al teachers simply gave the children the new words from the next book to learn as flash cards at home.  Next day, all being well, the child returned to school, read the book to the teacher, and took the new one away with a few more word...