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Broadbent Maths - creative primary maths

Adapting the Planning Menu to work well for your school

Friday, 14 October 2016
The purpose of my Maths Planning Menu was to provide support and expertise on teaching primary maths with planning resources that schools and teachers could pick and choose from. They can then combine this with other resources to plan their own creative maths lessons to best teach their class. I went into a school recently and they had used all the elements provided to teach a great lesson, using their own format. 

It was interesting to see the planning template created by the maths subject leader at Tall Oaks Academy for the staff of their three schools.  

Page size and orientation
An instantly visible change was to the page orientation and size, with landscape used rather than portrait and an A3 size preferred to A4. It helped that they had an A3 printer and all their planning documents used that size.

NC objectives
They incorporated the NC objectives on the medium term planning template, using the information from my separate reference document. They also included the NC objectives for the year before, useful for teachers to see what had been taught before and use for AfL to check pupils understanding. The next learning objectives were also added so teachers knew where they would be heading next, to touch upon it if appropriate. One change they are putting in is to make the NC objectives smaller on the sheet as these looked a little too dominant.

Their main planning focus headings are:

Concrete, Symbolic and Abstract and AfL questions - teachers could use and insert my suggestion or create their own.

Practise activities

Mastery activities /problem solving - teachers can view my new bank of resources of teaching and problem solving activities and select those that they wish to use. 

The 'I can' statements - transferred from my templates, ready for the teachers. 

Statistics, mental arithmetic focus and language are completed ready for teachers to use as additional information for the whole unit. 



An important part of developing the Planning Menu was to encourage schools and teachers to use the information in their own way. Many of the school I visit have adapted various sections and used the resources I provide for referenece and guidance rather than having a prescriptive format to follow. 

A number of teachers and schools are choosing to change the order of the 18 units provided. As long as whole topics are taught in the right order (e.g. Place Value 1 before Place Value 2) there is the flexibility to do this. Think about what else is being taught throughout the year - geometry works well with many Christmas activites and measures could be linked to sports day, for example. 

Some schools are trying to block topics into longer units, by teaching Place Value 1 and 2 together, rather than a more spiral approach. It will be interesting how this works in practise and the effect on improving the depth of understanding. 

The Planning Menu provides a structure that can be used just as it is, but its strength is that it can be adapted by schools and changed to suit the needs of your children.

UnitA3plan

User Schools:
The subject lead of one our user schools, Sarah Fitzpatrick from Tall Oaks Academy Trust, has adapted the plans so they fit on two sides of A3 paper. If you are interested in seeing how it is arranged, click here for a sample from Y6.

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