Getting Agency Ready - Post Two

If you have not purchased my book and would like to know more please visit here for a PDF or email me on numberagents@gmail.com for a hard copy version.  There is a lot more in the book to provide you with detail of this process that I will not go into with these blog posts.


I have posted a few of these ideas in my first getting ready post, but thought I revisit the specifics of the first 5-6 weeks to help you with the direction your agency may take and how it will come into being.

Step One - Right, thinking about the first two-three weeks back at school.  Before any agency is opened children need to be confident and comfortable expressing themselves and an environment of playfulness, creativity and acceptance needs to be built.  The best way I have found to do this is through simple drama games.  I have put several of my go-to games in this resource.

My plan when going back is to set up a positive classroom environment with children happy to take risks using these games.  I always start with the space game.  I enjoy this game particularly because it is very non-threatening.  From the space game I build to the trading game and move on from there.

Within the first two-three weeks (or even four if the class takes longer) I will use a variety of these drama games as brain breaks daily.  All of mathematics initially will come out of self-directed play based and we will take our cues from children here.

As I begin to feel that a culture of acceptance and confidence in drama has been set up I will move on to more specific agency tasks.

Step Two - THE HOOK - From here I will start to send in some maths challenges...these are likely to come from nursery rhyme/fairy tale characters and I am working on creating a resource of these at the moment.  They will come from a variety of mathematical areas.  The idea of these challenges are that they are short, fun, and achievable...they should invoke some talk and discussion and ideally they should be done in mixed groups so that children become accustomed to working together.

Step Three - BUILDING BELIEF - By week 4-5 we should be up to building belief.  At this stage I intend to introduce head agent.  He/She will come in via voki.  Drawing our attention to the fact that they have had many good reports about our mathematical ability and he would like us to set up an agency so that we can defeat mathematical villains that are lurking around the world causing havoc.  He will ask us to set up a company building and we will do this using our imaginations and drawing a space that we would love to work in.  This can be as big, or small as you like.  Depending on the age and ability of your children, head agent could even give them a sample of furniture they can order and price values of each thing along with a budget....this would be fun if they are able to do this.

....This should take us to week 5 or 6 and we will be ready to learn how to go in and out of agency and actually start work in agency.