Last Monday we had the great pleasure of working on Numerical Reasoning with SIG-24, a group of 11 schools headed by the tireless Janet Hayward (Headteacher at Cadoxton Primary School). The schools brought some learners from their Year 4 and 5 classes and we gave them a few challenges from our Numerical Reasoning resource pack in the morning, whilst we worked with the teachers in the afternoon to help these 11 schools to develop numerical reasoning even further.
We must say that this group of schools is already doing an awful lot to develop reasoning across the curriculum and the presentations the learners gave to summarise the work done so far were quite inspiring.
We were very pleased, though not surprised, to see all learners so engaged throughout the morning in the challenges we gave them. All groups took a keen interest in the activities and worked extremely well with children they had not met before this event. Although we gave some challenging tasks to stretch these learners, they all came up with some remarkable solutions and the quality of their work was worthy of top GCSE grades. Talking to one of the headteachers we agreed that often teachers can underestimate what their learners can do and usually our pupils will exceed our expectations, if we give them the opportunity. Our resource pack is designed to do just that and now that we have tested it with a large number of learners and schools, we can confidently say it does what it says on the tin, and Monday was just another confirmation of this!
Another report that made our day was that we were told the learners were still talking about the activities they did in the morning when they were roasting marshmallows and drinking hot chocolate around a camp fire in the school woods in the afternoon, while their teachers were working with our resource pack in their training afternoon. That was a great confirmation that the learners had really enjoyed working with our resources and that they really made them think deeply about numerical reasoning. What more can you ask from a lesson, eh?
The afternoon training session was equally enjoyable and the teachers went back to their schools feeling confident that they can develop numerical reasoning effectively through our resources. See what they thought about our training and resource pack in the comments below.
“An excellent course! I particularly enjoyed using technology to aid reasoning.” (Jonathan Desmond)
“Great delivery, and a good pace when getting to grips with the iPads. Excited to get started back at school!” (Scott Howells)
“Really enjoyed exploring the apps in the afternoon session and linking them to numerical reasoning.” (Jane Goldsworthy)
“I enjoyed using the iPad features as I feel they could be incorporated into my class teaching to engage learners.” (Hayley Makie)
If you would like to know more about our Numerical Reasoning Resource Pack and training and book a place to our next training events, click here.
